Indexing the landscape

Past event

The ancestral gesture of recording inhabited and passable places through images, of collecting data and elaborating a complex network of signs through which to identify these contexts and indicate the distinctive elements of each place, led to the creation of taxonomies with the aim of conceptualising and making functional the spatial categories and metaphors that would describe the territory and the transformations operated on it by human beings in their daily activity. Possibly, the conception of landscape reaches its greatest expression, as a historical construction, in the establishment of borders that testify to the emergence of the nation-state and the geopolitical redistribution in the modern/colonial world system. The chimera of ordering that incommensurable universe and capturing it in a representation on a minimal scale, encompassable from the near distance of the spectator, has established the genealogy of the concept of landscape in disciplines and narratives such as those of Western art history, philosophy, geography, cartography, architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, etc. 

This regime of image production, which evolved in parallel with technological developments, has responded to the ideologies and strategic functions of modern imperialism. According to the philosopher Jean-Marc Besse, from the 16th century onwards “landscape is (...) the visual illustration of the new geographical experience of the world”. The imagination of this world as a totality and of unknown lands took shape in Renaissance maps as a projection of an expansionist anthropocentric desire for the domination of nature. The first exotic, racist and colonial images of Abya Yala or America reached Europe through the fictions and visions of the drawings, paintings and engravings of travelling artists commissioned by the metropolises; and they circulated through postcards and the illustrated press of the time. The novel aerial photographs taken in 1859 established themselves as a technique for capturing images for military purposes during the Second World War.

Indexing the landscape is thus tantamount to producing a notion of “landscape”, to conferring meanings on these images as political devices that will play an essential role in visual culture. This exhibition does not aim to focus on the repertoire of images included in it as objects of contemplation, but rather to attempt to reveal the epistemological conditioning factors and power relations that have intervened in these constructions. In this exhibition, the walls of the room do not become the shop windows of tourist agencies where a picturesque catalogue of places and landscapes can be observed through the eyes of the anthropological traveller of overmodernity. Here, the urgent questions are posed not only to potential audiences, but also to those who have been responsible for producing such images: how does an artist behave when he is aware of the dialogue he engages in with a long tradition of representation that responds to the ideologies, interests and patriarchal violence of the modern/colonial gender world system; what strategies to adopt in the face of the mechanisms of invisibilisation that run through the canons of representation of the landscape genre in the history of Western art; what strategies to adopt in the face of the mechanisms of invisibilisation that run through the canons of representation of the landscape genre in the history of Western art?

CREDITS

This activity is part of Living several times at once. The shared memory of the Academy which Santiago Eraso, cultural manager and member of the Academy's Board of Trustees, is coordinating as part of the commemoration of the Academy's 150th anniversary. The project covers all three The aim is to recognise this anniversary as a process of openness and commemoration of the institution's constant spirit of renewal.

Image:
Jose GuerreroDegli Acquedotti
2016
Pigment printing on cotton paper
Frame: 55 x 71 x 3 cm; image: 32 x 48 cm
Ed. 2/10

Commissioners:
Suset Sanchez

Artists: 

Laura F. Gibellini, Laura Lio Martorelli, Jose Guerrero, Clara Montoya, Jesús Madriñán, Santiago Ydáñez, Miki Leal, Santiago Giralda, Àlex Nogué, Jesús Herrera Martínez, Gabriela Bettini, Anna Talens, Enrique Radigales, Isidro Tascón, Rosell Meseguer, Santiago Morilla, Sonia Navarro, Paula Anta, Jorge Yeregui, Juan Zamora, Àngels Viladomiú, Elena Lavellés, Rosalía Banet.

Organised by:
Royal Academy of Spain in Rome and Cerezales Antonino y Cinia Foundation

In collaboration with: 

Acción Cultura Española and Museo del Traje