Landscape in the age of accelerated ecocide

Alphaville, 2022

Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2018

2010

Visual Arts Research, 2010

Art Bulletin, 2021

Art Bulletin Review by Paul Monty Paret

Critique d’art, 2008

2012

In their article "Narratives of Loss and Order and Imaging the Belgian Landscape 1900- 1945" Bruno Notteboom and David Peleman analyze a number of publications on landscape, focusing on narratives constructed by means of landscape images published in Belgium. With the work of Jean Massart and Emile Vanderwelde as a point of departure, Notteboom and Peleman discuss popularizing publications in the fields of botany, agricultural education, and tourism, as well as an urban planning. They address the three realms of landscape narratives defined by Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton as story, context/intertext, and discourse. Notteboom and Peleman distinguish three recurrent operations or narrative techniques: framing, sequencing, and juxtaposing whereby their main argument is that in spite of their ideological differences the publications they discuss seek a way of dealing with processes of modernization and with the loss of a traditional way of living defined by a direct re...

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,

LUP Student Papers, 2018

Although landscape representations in the US-European culture have traditionally been acknowledged as a peaceful ordering of the world or the tool of imperialism, nationalism and private property (sometimes all simultaneously), a new shift in the landscape scopic regime seems to be happening. Produced by the current rise of concerns around climate change and environmental crisis, this shift seems to be related to a specific attention to land use and land value. In other words, instead of focusing on aesthetical conventions and on an idealisation of nature, the landscape is perceived as a relationship between human’s socio-political activities and the nature where they take place. However, it is legitimate to ask how the aesthetical aspects of these new landscapes are constructed and wonder if it is possible to evade such problematic history. In this context, where landscape topic is studied by different disciplines like art history and visual studies but also geography, anthropology and political ecology, the landscape definitions are diverted by activists and artists addressing subjects like the Anthropocene and the commons. This thesis analyses two European artists’ video essays: Deep Weather by Ursula Biemann and Everything is coming together, while everything is following apart: the ZAD by Oliver Ressler. Their works, that have in common to depict peripheral occupied landscapes, are compared and interpreted, with the objective to discuss their different approaches. Applying theoretical tools as Nicolas Mirzoeff’s visuality and Trevor Paglen’s concept of experimental geography, the two artists’ positions will be questioned: from the view from above to the people in the field, from the global to the local, from the observer to the viewer. These two artists offer landscapes, understood as a space and as its representation, that reveal the pointlessness of the war on nature and how communal activities could be a first step to rethink the relationship between human and nature.

2016

Abstract: As a counterpoint to the Western notion of the Sublime, which represents Nature as a force that we, as humans, face only to be overwhelmed by its encompassing Oneness, the films produced by Studio Ghibli signify nature as a friendly neighbor. This Japanese relationality between nature and the human is illustrated lushly and with virtuosity in films such as *My Neighbor Totoro*, tapping into a rich and long-established system of aesthetics regarding landscape that is decidedly different from that put forth by Western metaphysical philosophy. Thematizing the interactive relation between nature and human beings can also be comprehended on a semiotic level in the sense that meaning takes place in the relationality itself between signifiers within any given system. This paper will explore the proposition that Studio Ghibli films foreground, through narrative techniques, a larger, more abstract philosophical investigation into relationality itself, whereas the Western Sublime se...