OXYMORON LANDSCAPE

"Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of harmony; it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder"

(Werner Herzog, in conversation with Les Blank, in the film Burden of Dreams)

"Through me alone rubber becomes word"

(The character of Fitzcarraldo, in the film of the same name by Werner Herzog)

An enormous steamboat making a laborious ascent up a steep mountain, in the heart of the Amazon jungle: the image is a metaphor of the oxymoron landscape, and evokes the synthesis of the notions of construction and destruction inherent in the very concept of landscape. The scene comes from Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo, in which an eccentric character wants, come what may, to fulfil his dream of building an opera house deep in the jungle, for the pleasure of hearing the voice of the mythical Caruso in that place. To achieve this, the steamboat has to be transported over the impenetrable territory separating two rivers, in order to avoid sailing over the strong rapids of a meander. Once this has been accomplished, the challenge fails when it comes up against another dream, that of the jungle dwellers who, after lending their backbreaking labour to the endeavour, decide to deliver the steamboat to the river divinities, giving the landscape back its own image.

Faced with sequences such as this, we should ask ourselves whether landscape is evoked, or discovered, or constructed; we wonder whether destruction is the common element to all this, as this ambivalence may actually be the generating force behind all landscape. What is landscape, really? Does it exist on its own, in nature, or does it arise from the construct of the gaze? Does it respond merely to a vision, or should it be related to experience and emotion?

To find a conclusive explanation for the notion of landscape is, like Fitzcarraldo's dream, a task which is domed to failure, as witnessed by the endless number of studies, accounts and articles written on the subject from the Romantic Movement to the present day. Thus, while some authors, such as Nicolàs Maria Rubió i Tudurí, sustain that landscape pre-dates humanity itself[1], other authors consider that landscape is above all a mental construct which is conceivable only through our gaze and our account of it. Among the latter is Marc Augé, who states that "all landscape exists only for the gaze that discovers it. This requires the existence of at least one witness, one observer. Furthermore, the presence of the gaze, which produces landscape, presupposes other presences, other witnesses or other social actors. The landscapes which appear to be most natural all owe something to the hand of man, and those which appear to be completely independent of nature have all been approached, have allowed us to come near them, by a series of means of communication and technical devices which enable us to turn them into landscapes. Gaze alone does not suffice for a landscape to exist: there must also be a conscious perception, a judgement and, finally, a description. Landscape is the space that one man describes to other men. The description may aspire to objectivity or to indirect, poetic, metaphorical evocation. The power of words is necessary when he who has seen addresses those who have not seen. And for words to have the power of making others see, descriptions and translations will not suffice. On the contrary, the words must demand and arouse the imagination of the others, and liberate their ability to create their own landscape[2]".

We can thus consider that landscape is "told" from the narrative of he who gazes upon it. However, the neutral gaze does not exist; all narratives contain turning points, and emphasise aspects which for some reason or other stand out as image generators. Segments of the landscape described (and therefore constructed) are often part of episodes taking place, and leave perceptible traces in the description. To discover and describe the traces, one must travel through them, after which one may be able to echo the words of Claudio Magris on completing his long journey along the Danube (described in the book of the same name): "nature is everything, even that which appears to deny it".

Experience and research into spatial and phenomenological categories on the natural, urban and emotional features of landscape underpin the approach of Landscape? to aspects such as progress, identity and public space. These are dealt with at the exhibition from both affirmative and negative positions, in a discourse which explores several different opposing possibilities.

If construction and destruction are two sides of the same coin, then to what extent do they affect and relate to social, economic and political transformations concerning the landscape, and vice versa? Is landscape a fiction, or is it a pretence arising from the avid need of our accelerated modern world for consumerism and spectacular sights, fostered by tourism and development? To what extent does landscape creation pertain to any given territory? Or landscape destruction?

Landscape? presents proposals based on the territory, as a means of activating a learning process on these and other issues.

In the same way as Herzog and Magris both responded to a need to journey through the natural landscape in order to better understand it, Nico Baumgarten (Kiel, Germany, 1981) and Alfonso Borragán (Santander, 1983) have taken the River Ter as a metaphor, as a territory from which to reflect on landscape.

Following the course of the Ter from its source to its mouth, Baumgarten has taken photographs of the river, setting up a dialogue with the territory. His images treasure the stories of the people and the buildings that have crossed paths along the way, in this dynamic, constantly-changing space which moves at the pace of nature, but also at the pace of industrialisation. Workers, hunters, tramps, sportspeople, travelling salesmen and walkers, together with factories, woods, vans, trailers and urban waste, all of which bring life and death, memory and identity to a space of transit. Landscapes which reflect man's intervention over and over again, and which may also be seen as options for life on the margins of society, gestures of freedom or even of resistance.

The walls of a giant dam interrupting the flow of the river at Susqueda Reservoir merge with the surrounding woods in an image that recalls a romantic landscape painting; the image evokes resistance and control of nature, and sets up bonds of complicity with another sort of resistance, those who live in transit, nomads who circulate along the river and follow its course. Thus, a Frenchman called David was able to survive his trailer being flooded by a sudden water level rise at the mouth of the Ter when he found, among the debris along the river bank, a book signed by Picasso which he then sold to a museum; Lluís lives under a bridge which he calls home, where he tends his garden; an African called Saiku prepares to dig the soil for a vegetable garden on his allotment in Salt. Baumgarten's gaze goes beyond anecdote or documentary; it seeks to capture the soul of the river, to shed light on the hidden layers of a social fabric that is equally rich as its surrounding territory.

These are inner landscapes, highlighted by a journey which, like the river, flows through what Augé defines as "zones of resistance to the evidence"; through what is present but not evident, detectable through its echoes of resistance, and which should be brought to the surface. "Even though our awareness of them is only ephemeral and intuitive, there are zones of resistance to the evidence in the world that surrounds us, and within each one of us. The aim of the journey, the aim of literary research, should be (and sometimes is) to explore these zones of resistance. They exist inside us and outside us; we cannot exclude the presence of bridges between this inside and this outside which should be brought to light[3]".

Alfonso Borragán's project, carried out in several different natural settings, attempts to reveal what is hidden, and to obtain images existing in the landscape from within the landscape. In the woods, making cameras with branches in order to photograph trees with their own material; on the beach, making cameras of sand, which capture a sunset as they are swallowed up by the sea; and on the river, making cameras with clay found on its banks, and floating them on the water to collect the images "captured" by the river as it flows along its course.

In the context of Landscape? exhibition, Borragán wished to share the process of his project at the Clay Cameras workshop. The group experience started out at a place where the River Ter flows underground, but where the boulders and pebbles on the dried-up riverbed still retain the memory of its waters. Borragán took these elements to make clay mounds in situ, thus obtaining the first cameras, receptacles that would receive the images of the water which had given them their original shape. The resulting camera obscuras were rough, fragile objects and, in order to obtain good ceramic quality for the Ter project, the artist and his group headed off to La Bisbal, centre of the local pottery industry. At one of the quarries, they experienced and participated in industrialised nature through a game, perceiving and re-understanding it through clouds of clay dust suspended in the air, weightless earth which they would later bring down to the river. At the end of the day, the clay cameras were fired in a natural kiln, while food was cooked and relationships burgeoned among the group members, and the landscape experienced during the day was recounted through the images of memory. From that point, the idea was to recover lost memory with the newly sensitised cameras, by leaving them in the river to capture images of transit.

Parallel to his workshop, Borragán concentrates his creation process on producing the ceramic pieces, the ultimate alchemy of Tierra de Nadie [No Man's Land], a series carried out specifically in Girona and based on the artist's experience in the city.

However, in order to view these fragments of landscape which can only be "seen" by the river from its own perspective and movement, it will be necessary to destroy the cameras, and with them, the image itself.

Clara Boj and Diego Díaz (Murcia, 1975) also adopt play as a strategy, situating their field of operations in places on the urban landscape specifically designed for playing. Children's playgrounds, those artificial enclosures containing specific urban furniture, constitute the domesticated landscape where children play out their first games and, to a certain extent, their first experiences with other youngsters in the public space. Today, however, this is not the only play environment with which they are familiar. Children become used to technology from an early age, and often find a playground in virtual spaces. The video games they carry in their pockets incorporate portable landscapes which are shared over a distance, displaced from their context, through which children experience a kind of parallel environment.

With Hybrid Playground, Boj and Díaz seek a space of intersection between both these territories. With a group of children, the artists created a video game designed to be activated in playgrounds. The idea is that children can play with the device while they enjoy all the fun of traditional swings and slides. The virtual landscape overlaps with the public urban landscape, creating a new, hybrid territory which is more flexible and also generates new interactional relationships between children and their surroundings, and between children and their parents. This is an additional advantage compared to standard video games, which are usually only for individual use.

On the other hand, today's public urban space is cordoned off and designed for one specific use, which reduces the possibilities of children using their imagination. By activating Hybrid Playground, children can be taking physical exercise as they slither down a slide and at the same time using their imagination as they hunt for a treasure in a fictional ocean or soar over the clouds in an imaginary virtual world.

Once again, we find ourselves on fertile territory for the creation of inner landscapes from the imagination, where a concrete, artificially designed landscape can turn into a fictional landscape or even a science-fiction landscape. The echo of Jean-Luc Godard's oft-repeated words concerning the creation of images and the power of the imagination are still valid: "The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison, but from two realities, more or less distant, brought together. The more the relation between the two realities is distant and accurate, the stronger the image will be - the more it will possess emotional power and poetic reality". The quotation is from Pierre Reverdy[4], and situates us once again within the emotional experience and the traffic of mental images, with all their symbolic, evocative power. In a nutshell, we are dealing here with images as creators of landscape, and with landscape as a creator of images, in a circular process with no restricting or well-defined limits.

Herzog claims that his recent book, Conquest of the Useless, published twenty-four years after the filming of Fitzcarraldo, is an account of the inner landscapes that were created within him after his experiences making the film, which affected his own identity. "More than anything else, I describe inner events. I'll say it once again: it is about the dream of a delirious man. It is a book of invented catastrophes. It is as if, during the filming of Fitzcarraldo, I had written poetry on what it is like to live in the jungle".

From a similar perspective, Pauline Oliveros (Houston, USA, 1932) also situates herself in the space between the overwhelming power of the landscape and the construction of identity. In Dreams of the Jungfrau, an experimental film made jointly with Ione, we witness the creation of a captive character in an observation point, the emblematic Hotel Regina at the foot of the famous Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau peaks in the Swiss Alps. The icons of the overwhelmingly grandiose landscape provide the framework within which to present the story of a woman who re-lives episodes from her past behind the walls of the hotel, while she hears the voices of oracles guiding her through the rooms and the insistent presence of the views, in a constant journey between physical and psychic experience. Pauline Oliveros sustains that inner landscapes arise from experiencing and listening to one's own body, from one's breathing and its relationship with the environment. This in turn shapes the awareness of the character and that of her observers, bearing witness to the parameters of memory and daydreaming lurking within. Oliveros created her famous Sonic Meditations back in 1971, a sort of instruction manual for activating self-awareness through "self listening". Sonic Meditations includes non-judgmental perception, the development of empathy through listening, the creation of non-hierarchical social relationships in music making, the expanded use of intuitive forms of internal and external awareness, and new understandings of sensuality and the body. Sonic Meditations strategies for listening will be available at Landscape? under the dome of Bòlit-SantNicolau (a space with a strong religious background) for anybody wishing to experience and enjoy the EarPhone Installation in situ, a selection of Oliveros' sound work interventions in interior architectural spaces, including Deep Listening and Tara's Room.

The Manifesto against the Landscape by Lluís Sabadell i Artiga (Girona, 1974), to be published in the June issue of Bonart magazine together with replies from experts in the fields of landscaping, architecture and biology, occupies a position which is antagonistic to, but paradoxically coinciding with, many of the above-mentioned considerations. In the exhibition, visitors are welcomed by a shadow projection proclaiming that "landscape does not exist", a statement by the artist's argument paraphrasing the biologist Paul Ehrlich: "No, landscape does not exist. It is a cultural, mental construct. It is a shadow. Landscape is an idea, which is why landscape does not exist. Out there (beyond our minds) something else exists, which is not landscape. In fact, since landscape made its appearance, nature started to die. Bearing in mind that nature is gradually losing ground to landscape (which does not exist), nature is dying little by little. Nature is not landscape, in the same way as landscape is not nature. Nature began to die on the first day that the sun rose and illuminated a landscape. When man perishes, landscape will perish with him, "but butterflies will continue to fly...'". Sabadell proceeds to guide us through the exhibition space with his Beauty and Shit (Butterfly Suite), projection which shows a group of butterflies feeding on the sustenance provided by a pile of horse dung. The image is a clear allusion to the existence of landscape and to its denial, in an infinite cycle in which food and excrement, beauty and waste, are the same element because, as the artist notes, "everything is part of everything and, in actual fact, everything is everything and is nothing".

Just like the existence of the oxymoron landscape, affirmation and negation of itself within its own configuration.

Rosa Pera

[1] Nicolás Maria Rubió i Tudurí: Del paraíso al jardín latino, Tusquets, Barcelona, 1981, p. 19.

[2] Marc Augé: El tiempo en ruinas, Gedisa, Barcelona, 2003, p. 86.

[3] Marc Augé: op.cit., p. 82.

[4] Pierre Reverdy: Escritos para una poética ("Writings for a Poetic Theory"), Monte Ávila Editores, Caracas, pp. 25-26.