Pad (Dec 2019)
Landscape is a Space of Action and Thought
Abstract
Landscape is a containing and a contained space, an image space and a representation of space. Communities continuously interact with the landscape and in it. In this article, we will try to identify the trajectory within one of the landscapes that have posed the greatest number of questions about the relationship between nature and culture over the centuries – The Mediterranean. We will do this with a non-linear perspective. We will make a journey that leads us to a reading of this space through a combination of different outlooks and experiences, like contemporary art and experimental museums, to affirm the impermanence that has always characterized the idea of the Mediterranean, and the necessity to continually reformulate its meanings. This article is based on the meetings I have had in recent years working as a curator between Rome and Lampedusa, within participatory artistic projects characterized by the dialogue between migrant people and local communities. The assumption of our article is the intersection of this Space consciousness with the aesthetics of engagement (Berleant 2004), through which artistic practices act in the anthropic landscape. This approach overcomes and articulates the meaning of site-specific in the direction of a contextual practice that modifies the contexts in which it takes place and reformulates the geopolitical balances at the base of Western art. The practice of public artists will be presented through the example of a participatory project conceived in 2018 by the Bianco Valente duo in Palermo, for the exhibition Land of me. The works show the polysemy of this landscape: “Space of otherness, of confrontation and hybridization of identity” that build itself through experiences of dialogue and laboratory in which a shared creative practice can produce new narratives. The choice to introduce the works in mainly descriptive terms is due both to the lack of bibliography on such a recent project and to my participation in the elaboration of the contents itself. The conversation with the artists for the drafting of the exhibition catalogue highlighted the need to tackle very current and dramatic topics such as the experience of migration, in a simple way understandable by everyone.
