Exploring the ordinary to understand landscapeness (original) (raw)
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Philosophy of Landscape : Think, Walk, Act
2019
This landmark collection of essays on landscape offers a much-needed comprehensive exploration of an important dimension of our human environment. Landscape is different from such environmental topics as the forest, the city, and the sea. Unlike other subjects of environmental inquiry, landscape is strangely situated, giving it a compelling significance. For landscape is not a place that can be clearly demarcated. It is not a natural object like a mountain or a river, nor is it a location such as a valley or an island. In fact, landscape is no thing at all. Etymologically speaking, landscape is an expanse of the perceived environment: a scene, a region, surroundings as viewed by an observer. This gives landscape unique standing in environmental experience because landscape cannot be considered alone: it is, in effect, defined by and in relation to human perception. Landscape is a relationship. We can think here of the Claude glass, so called because it was an optical device, invented by the seventeenth century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, through which an artist or a traveler in the countryside could look and adjust in order to frame a pleasing aspect of the scenery, arranging the view through the glass to resemble what a painter would depict with brush and paint. This exemplifies how what is designated as a landscape depends on the viewer, a point of exceeding importance. For there is no landscape "out there", so to speak, no independent object or place. Recognizing this has dramatic implications, for it demonstrates how landscape is actually a complex synthesis of viewer and environment. Recognizing this led me to entitle my first extended discussion of environment, "The Viewer in the Landscape", and that same understanding underlies many of the essays in this volume. Moreover, landscape has been used metaphorically in ways that do not always suit a visual meaning, such as 'earthscape' and 'spacescape' and even in referring to memories of one's previous home as an internal landscape.-Filosofia da Paisagem. Estudos, 2013. A compilation of essays by Adriana Veríssimo Serrão, the principal investigator of the project. Organized in four chapters: "Anthropology and Philosophy of Nature"; "Nature and Art: The Composite Categories"; "Landscape and Environment. A theoretical debate" and "Problems of Philosophy of the Landscape", the book reflects on the essence of Landscape as idea and reality, being and manifestation. 'A piece of nature' is, as such, an internal contradiction; nature has no pieces, it is the unity of a whole. The instant anything is removed from this wholeness, it is no longer nature, precisely because it can only be 'nature' within that unlimited unity, as a wave of that global flow. 2 19 Spazio limitato il paesaggio, ma aperto, perché, a differenza degli spazi chiusi, ha sopra di sé il cielo, cioè lo spazio illimitato; e non rappresenta l'infinito (simbolicamente o ilusionisticamente), ma si apre all'infinito, pur nella finitezza del suo essere limitato: costituendosi come presenza,
The making of landscape in modernity
National Identities, 2014
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Landscape as a Connection – Beyond Boundaries
2013
This research deals with several problems of the contemporary city – problem of administrative boundaries and relationship between the city and its public spaces.1 Cities are ever increasing, often uncontrolled and rarely planned as a whole, almost always without thinking about city’s identity. Furthermore the problem of boundaries in general is evident in the periphery which is undeveloped edge of the city. In Croatia boundaries are an obstacle to urban planning, they make it difficult to overview the entire space of the city because its illogical divisions. What is an urban landscape and how it can contribute to development of the new image of the 21st century city is a current theme of planning (eg. Grand Paris considerations). At the Faculty of Zagreb cities from different regions are being researched through a series of workshops in Landscape Architecture and Urbanism. The aim is to reject administrative boundaries in order to create new area of a city based on the landscape. W...
Conference Presentation - "The Value Of Landscape" - Turin, 2001
Calvino dedicates the American Lessons "..to some values or qualities or specificities (of literature) which are particularly close to my heart, trying to situate them in the perspective of the new millennium" and then speaks, as we know, of values such as Lightness , Rapidity, Accuracy, Visibility, Multiplicity. Today, here, we would like to work in the same spirit: to emphasize the specificity of the landscape, to examine its theoretical but also its operational implications, which affect daily behavior and our work. We would like to discuss the qualities, the opportunities and the alternative choices, instead of the absolute value of landscape. It is important to sustain a logic and ideological debate which daily practices related to territory force us to take into consideration. In those practices the value of the landscape (the sense of importance for its role) is outlined by itself, for its implicit comparison with other needs, with the choices, with the pleasures that are "competitive" in the use of the territory. In fact, now the theme of the landscape not only imposes itself on the attention of various disciplines of investigation as a "place" of the identity and driving force of the mobility of entire communities, but it has also become an axis of reference for most of the strategies related the territory: sustainability, safeguard of diversity, control of transformations are increasingly measured not only with the "structural" socio-economic aspects but also with the "cultural" and "political" aspects of the landscape. In the phase in which in the territorial and urban planning and in the intervention programs the watchword is "(re) qualification"; with a new perspective and a new understanding project, landscape allows to deal with themes of great urgency, such as those emerging from the critical places of abandonment (the "mountain", the "hinterland"), the anomie (the "peri-urban", the "infrastructural"), the degradation (the "exploited", the "abandoned"). All this involves the entry of the landscape theme into the world of practices, projects, guided transformations. It is also for this reason that suddenly the landscape became subject to an assessment of operational comparison among alternative analysis of advantages or penalties: it exits the indisputable system of immaterial and immeasurable assets and one enters into that of goods that are not indefinitely available but limited, perishable, to some extent considered as scarce resources. Let us therefore assume the value of the landscape as a center of reflection: it allows to see under a different light both the concept of “landscape” and “value”, each of the two terms leads the other to the margins of its own consolidated meaning, it is measured with unusual and practical theoretical elaborations, which we will discover in common use but which we have too little analyzed and discussed. We can perhaps define the landscape itself as a result of the process of putting the territory into cultural value, like that system of signs that can be read in the territory and appreciated by each of us individually or as a social or cultural group (the inhabitants, nature lovers, fans of the mountains, …). The territory pre-exists, in this sense, the landscape, which is produced by a selection, by a cultural enhancement of parts with respect to an undifferentiated whole. For the landscape, related to the territory (and the environment), it seems to take place what Wittgenstein said it usually takes place for art in relation to nature: "... art shows us the wonders of nature. Its foundation is the concept of the prodigies of nature. (The blossoming of a flower. What's so great about this?) It is said: "Look how it opens up!" If landscape, like art, is a medium and if this is the cultural value of the landscape, first of all we are interested in understanding if and how the cultural value is turned into economic value, which controlled passages bring to that selective and underlining process, all subjective and similar to the artistic one, to define a product that can be used as a resource, as an asset to be exchanged for other goods, shared with a community that some measure does not only use it but also trade. Secondly we are interested in getting into the merits, not only understanding the mechanisms of translation of the landscape from good to resource, but also understanding the criteria that made us prefer it, the Qualities, as Calvino said, of the landscape we care about.
Anti-Grand: Contemporary Perspectives on Landscape
Anti-Grand: Contemporary Perspectives on Landscape, 2015
Catalogue for the exhibition "Anti-Grand: Contemporary Perspectives on Landscape," on view at the Joel and Lila Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums, Jan. 15 to March 6, 2015. The exhibition featured 24 contemporary, international artists, artists’ collectives and game developers who examine, challenge, and re-define the concept of landscape while simultaneously drawing attention to humanity’s hubristic attempts to relate to, preserve, and manage the natural environment. Anti-Grand included 33 works of art, with video, installation, video games, and traditional two- and three-dimensional work.