The Blaenserchan Project: a Methodological Framework
1. Research Orientation and Core Task
The central task of this research is to make sense of Blaenserchan Colliery and the Cwm Ddu Valley beyond their inscription as a static historical site or, more commonly, as a spiritualised or nostalgic landscape. While such framings remain culturally powerful, particularly within local memory and post-industrial identity, they risk obscuring the material, political and ecological forces that continue to shape the landscape today.
The project therefore proceeds through a dual methodological orientation:
Analytical–material: the landscape is approached as a landscape of capital, a product of industrialisation, labour, and surplus-value extraction, whose effects persist unevenly in both human and non-human life.
Figurative–speculative: the landscape is also treated as an emblematic site capable of mediating access to what is outside itself: to that which remains unresolved or obscured within the historical record, the present ecological condition and possible futures locally, nationally and globally.
This dual approach resists treating the landscape as either inert ruin or redeemed nature nor as a localised condition. Instead, it frames Blaenserchan and Cwm Ddu Valley as an active, contested site where histories of extraction, labour, and environmental degradation intersect with contemporary questions of climate breakdown, land use and ecological responsibility.
2. Theoretical Lineage: Cognitive Mapping, Constellation, Negative Dialectics, Dialectical Image, Art’s Autonomy
The methodological framework draws upon critical theory and aesthetic philosophy, particularly the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson, all of whom insist that aesthetic practices are capable of producing rational knowledge, not merely affects.
Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping provides a political and methodological impetus how might figurative and aesthetic forms render perceptible the abstract, global operations of capitalism as they are lived locally and experientially. For Jameson, recognition is a prerequisite for political change, that representation, particularly that kind which connects the everyday to the objective reality of capital allows us to ‘see’ that which has until now remained hidden.
Benjamin’s concept of the constellation offers a non-linear mode of historical understanding, in which disparate material, historical, and affective elements are brought into dialectical relation. Knowledge emerges not through synthesis, but through tension; knowledge reveals itself through revelation a process fundamental to Benjamin’s dialectical image proposal.
Adorno’s negative dialectics, particularly as developed in the essay form as constellation, refines this approach into a method that resists closure, identity thinking (or fitting knowledge into a conventional and static closed box) and instrumental rationality. Truth, for Adorno, appears not in totality but in the refusal of false reconciliation.
Adorno’s ostensible autonomy of art, is central to what he termed “great art”: a form of practice capable of detaching the subject from the domain of instrumental reason and recalling something of our real nature. Within Adorno’s dialectical framework, art is rational precisely in its apparent irrationality; set against society’s dogmatic instrumental rationalism, it exposes that rationalism as itself irrational—an orientation that reduces not only human subjects but also the natural world to objects of calculation, extraction, and control. It is within this same logic that the domination of nature, now manifest in ecological degradation and climate instability, finds its historical and philosophical ground.
For this reason, the project relies less on a strict notion of autonomy than on a qualified or semi-autonomous conception of the artwork, while remaining indebted to Adorno’s formulation. Understood in this way, the art object resists becoming spectacle, entertainment, or a mirror of capitalist ideology, without claiming separation from the world it inhabits. Its autonomy lies in its refusal to be “predigested” or subordinated to the languages of profit, efficiency, and consumption—the very languages through which nature is rendered exploitable and disposable. Instead, the artwork remains close to both external nature and human nature, preserving a space in which the historical domination of nature, and its contemporary ecological consequences, can become perceptible and open to critical reflection. A relationship key to Adorno’s thinking on the mimetic and how we might stimulate a non-destructive relation to nature; a complex strand of his philosophy that the research will endeavour to untangle in practice.
Taking certain philosophical liberties, the project mediates between Benjamin’s speculative–theological model of the constellation and Adorno’s secularised, critical adaptation and along with his theory of autonomy. In doing so, it aligns with Benjamin’s notion of ‘crude theory’ or how theory can be remodeled appropriate for praxis.
3. Epistemological Pluralism
The project operates through a pluralistic methodology, combining rational analysis with imaginative, speculative and potentially redemptive modes of engagement.
In this sense, aesthetic practice becomes a critical instrument capable of:
• forging connections across heterogeneous forms of knowledge,
• resisting the reduction of nature and subjectivity to resource or informational data
• and introducing ethical, collective and experiential dimensions
that are often excluded from ecological, landscape or climate discourse.
4. Landscape as Dialectical Site and Climate Prism
The Blaenserchan landscape is approached as a dialectical site, a Benjaminian monad or microcosm through which the dynamics of history: global capitalism, ecological degradation and social precarity can be read in condensed form.
Although now designated a nature reserve, the apparent restoration of the valley should not be mistaken for ecological innocence. Such landscapes often function as:
• repositories of unresolved industrial damage,
• pretexts for new forms of commodification (leisure, tourism, carbon
offsetting),
• or managed environments shaped by economic imperatives rather than ecological justice.
• In Benjamin’s redemptive hermeneutic, they provide not only
warnings from history but access to genuine human relations of a collective and political kind, ones that remain active for us today, indeed, that such options remain open to us still.
The project insists that what capital has done to this landscape, to nature, through extraction, exhaustion and abandonment, prefigures the broader dynamics of the climate emergency. Following Marx’s insight, the domination of nature mirrors the domination of the subject. The climate crisis is thus not external to social relations, but an intensification of them.
By situating Blaenserchan within this framework, the project reads the post-industrial landscape not as an exception, but as a precursor: an early instance of ecological ruin, labour displacement, and environmental and social inequality that now characterise the global present.
5. Subjectivity, Memory and Critical Remembering
Central to the project is the question of how to make the subject present without romanticisation. The subject that emerges here is not heroic or nostalgic, but one shaped by economic necessity, political power and material conditions, alongside moments of resistance.
The project is not concerned with the past as a closed domain, but with how the past persists in the present:
• how suppressed histories continue to structure social and ecological realities,
• how landscapes remember exploitation even when it is visually obscured,
• and how critical remembering might contribute to imagining more just futures.
In alignment with Benjamin’s insistence on the redeemability of the past, the project treats historical inquiry as an intervention into the present, not an act of commemoration alone, but a form of political and ecological critique.
6. Art Objects as Heuristic Devices
Within this framework, the art object becomes essential. Its speculative and imaginative capacity allows it to operate beyond fixed or purely rational modes of knowledge. Rather than delivering predetermined meanings, it opens a poetic space in which multiple interpretations can coexist.
Artworks function heuristically:
• as keys that unlock unexpected connections,
• as artefacts that gather embodied, affective, and historical knowledge,
• and as devices through which ecological and social relations become perceptible.
Aesthetics, here, is not limited to discrete artefacts but operates as the connective tissue of the research constellation—binding together historical forces, lived experience and imaginative projection (in Benjamin’s hermeneutic, the paste that holds the mosaic, or idea, together).
7. Natural History, Capital, and the Climate Emergency
The scope of the study is both temporal and spatial, encompassing:
• a deep natural history of, for example, the geology of the region: coal, clay, ironstone natural ‘resources’ that brought capital to the area in the first place,
• an industrial, social and economic history
• and a contemporary ecological condition shaped by climate instability and the alibis that elide this reality.
Following Benjamin and Adorno, the project frames capital itself as a form of natural history. Nature and history (history understood as the temporality of human culture or, the progress in production) are understood as inseparable at every level: temporally, spatially, conceptually and materially. To treat them as distinct is to lapse into mythological thinking. The climate emergency emerges here not as a rupture, but as the cumulative outcome of this false separation, the research will argue.
This perspective allows the project to read ecological breakdown as historically produced—and therefore politically contestable against the often reification of the debate at hand, particularly by those who speak from or for the status quo.
8. Research as Diary and Living Investigation
In accordance with Adorno’s insistence that the research process itself contributes to the outcome’s truth-content, the project treats inquiry itself as a meaningful artefact. And that the constellation of findings, its knowledge content remains in motion, that there is no synthesis to speak of. Consequently, within this arrangement knowledge is produced not as a static possession of its object, but as a dynamic, egalitarian idea (resisting the coercive force of identity thinking, in Theodor Adorno’s terms or, put more prosaically, not attempting to force everything into one neat academic box). This methodology draws upon, in many ways, Walter Benjamin’s concept of knowledge as redemption, in fact is central to the research. As already articulated above, it does not seek a closed conclusion. Rather, it functions as a heuristic key to unlock unexpected connections across diverse fields of experience (in practical terms, this announces the particpatory or community art dimension of the project, which will be elaborated on later in the project).
The research is documented through a sustained journal over an 8 period, culminating in the 50th anniversary of the 1984–85 miners’ strike. This diaristic method:
• preserves uncertainty, contradiction and revision,
• resists premature closure
• and ensures the project remains a living investigation responsive to changing ecological and political conditions.
9. Interdisciplinarity, Praxis and Pedagogy
The project deliberately challenges academic silos by affording epistemological parity to art, philosophy and the sciences (including, for example, history, sociology and geography), understanding they have particular kinds of epistimological outputs. Their collaboration is understood as essential for addressing complex phenomena such as post-industrial communities, climate change and global economic and political precarity (recognising they are inseperable, under the rubric of capitalist production), which exceed any single disciplinary framework.
Crucially, the project insists on the presence of the subject within these processes—a subject often powerless, yet disproportionately affected by ecological breakdown—yet has vital real-life experience to offer the constellation. This recognition grounds the project’s activist dimension.
The methodology is therefore also pedagogical: it offers a model that others might adapt, in the spirit of Jameson’s cognitive mapping, as a political and critical tool. By connecting local experience to global systems, the project aims to contribute, however modestly, to climate awareness, critical agency, and the possibility of collective transformation.