Cuban Landscapes: Heritage, Memory, and Place

ZARCH

El concepto de paisaje es, sobre todo, una construcción cultural que recoge la relación del hombre con su entorno y en la que se integran compresión y construcción del medio en un proceso iterativo. De este modo, el paisaje es al mismo tiempo constructo y construcción, puesto que implica una “lectura” y una “escritura” no solo comprensivas, sino creativas del lugar. La complejidad y el dilatado alcance del concepto de paisaje dan lugar a que en torno a él se aglutinen un amplio abanico de perspectivas, como las formuladas desde la ecología por Leopold, Carson o McHarg, o aquellas que, como las de Long y Smithson, provienen del mundo del arte. Y entre ambas, otras muchas de diferentes disciplinas como la arquitectura, la planificación o el diseño. Todas estas miradas surgen de nuevos marcos conceptuales ya enunciados por Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Baudrillard, Delueze y Guattari y de su relación con pensamientos científicos, como los desarrollados por Lovelock, Prigogine o H...

2013

Beyond the boundaries of a physical space, places, as a means where it is registered the way in which man relates to the world, contain multiple spatiotemporal realities. Its reading requires, therefore, a look that can decipher the universe of ecological, historical, perceptual and cultural relationships that characterize them. However, at the present time, technique and reason seem to have tipped the balance on the tangible values against the intangible ones, banishing to oblivion its cultural, perceptual, emotional and phenomenological components. This article takes a brief look at a range of experiences that, from different disciplines involved with space, allow us to approach a collective and timeless readability of the place. These looks fruit of memory, the experience and creativity, show a very clear direction to serve the project from its identity. In this context, to visualize the information and bring out elements and relations forgotten or unknown, is in itself a creativ...

ICNAP 2025 Conference: "Phenomenology and Nature" Presenter abstracts May 21, 2025: "Creative Productivity: A Mode of Coming Closer to the World", 2025

Since 2019, climate activism spread decidedly worldwide. One of its main theoretical inspirators is Arne Naess and his deep ecology, recognizing the intrinsic value of nature, and underlining the inextricable in-terweaving of climate change and the ecological crisis. Nonetheless, science-policy strategies are running another pathway, as is demonstrated by international covenants and pacts – see the Kyoto Protocol (1997), instituting the cap-and-trade mechanism for managing greenhouse gas emissions. These covenants reveal the unwillingness of the states and other involved parts to cut greenhouse gas emissions starkly. Prioritizing economic and financial growth, these covenants demonstrate a trend toward an anthropic definition of the value of nature. Indeed, despite we face a global threat to human existence on Earth as we know it, we experience an abys-sal gap between our plethoric discourses on climate change and slow action before it. The fifth IPCC Report recognizes that at the current speed, we will break the Paris Agreement’s threshold already by 2023. This contribution hypothesizes that a fundamental problem lies at the core of our approach to climate change and the ecological crisis. Following Luhman’s insights about environmentalism, this research claims that our strategies before climate change and the ecological crisis coopt “noises” from the environment and environmental communication and translate them into the social systems’ syntax. Economic growth, profit, and endless development are the axioms biasing our strategies and preventing us from engaging in the radi-cal changes we need. A relevant example is the notion of Ecosystem Services that IPBES (2012) is slowly substituting to that of Biodiversity. The latter meaning the “fabric of life” - the origin of the variety of species on Earth - Biodiver-sity became pivotal in science-policy strategies from the eighties of the twentieth century and promoted a conservationist approach to nature. The notion of biodiversity implies that nature has intrinsic value. Con-trarily, since the nineties, the notion of Ecosystem Services has been promoting the idea that the value of nature relies on the services it offers to humans and that we can grasp this value only by monetizing these benefits. That also means that any more compelling urgency to human life should be prioritized over the environmental crisis. Against this background, this contribution discusses some insights on nature and the world offered by Han-nah Arendt’s phenomenology of the human condition. According to Arendt, the world and nature are two different conditions of human existence: the world includes artifacts, the set of objects that human beings put between them and nature. These products are durable and meant for use. Contrarily, nature is the over-arching biological process that forces humans to labor and consume: through their repetitive and futile fa-tigue, humans correspond to the fact that they are living beings, and the products of these activities (i.e., livelihoods) barely survives their production. Building the world means delving into nature, thereby destroy-ing it. For Arendt, the world and nature are distinct yet strictly intertwined, and a phenomenology of culture indi-cates a way of building a world that does not destroy nature yet preserves it. Indeed, the Latin word “Cul-ture” meant agriculture but also edification and care. According to Arendt, this indicates a way of building the world that preserves nature while making it a lasting shelter for human beings. This interpretation of culture resonates in the UNESCO notion of “Cultural Landscape” – a syntagm first coined at the beginning of the twentieth century by the geographer Sauer. Cultural landscapes are “the com-bined works of men and nature”, exceptional nets that the international community considered as worth pre-serving for their artistic value. Despite indicating only sites of rare beauty, “cultural landscapes” could be extended to label the strict cooperation of humans and nature in building a world. This notion demonstrates that humans can valorize nature as a cooperator in building places fit for human existence, without exploit-ing it. By replacing Ecosystem Services, Cultural Landscapes could preserve the inviolable ethical and aes-thetic value of secular nets of humans and nature, and guarantee a science-policy tool to valorize nature without monetizing it.

Scientific Journal of Applied Social and Clinical Science

Internet Archaeology, 2013

If we look at the landscape not as an object, far away and different from us, to dominate from the top of our superiority, but as a subject, as a person, in an absolutely topological perspective, then we must try to track down an interior light into landscapes, almost like a sap, which becomes an almost invisible but substantial support of the landscape itself .

Journal of Cultural Geography, 2016

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,

Rural Landscapes: Society, Environment, History, 2015