Indexing the landscape

Organised together with the Spanish Academy in Rome, Indexing Landscape brings together the work of 23 artists resident at the Academy who present their different investigations into landscape and its representation. With this exhibition, the Cerezales Antonino y Cinia Foundation joins the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Academy of Spain in Rome, which during 2023 and the beginning of next year, presents a varied programme in different parts of Spain and abroad. Specifically, it is part of one of the commemorative projects entitled "Living several times at once. The Shared Memory of the Spanish Academy in Rome", which covers the last three decades of the institution's history and is being developed in collaboration with various cultural institutions and Acción Cultural Española.

"Indexing the landscape", curated by Suset Sánchez, proposes a systemic analysis of landscape and approaches it from a critical perspective. This analysis re-signifies this genre as a political device that plays an essential role in visual culture, with the capacity to exercise or express powers and violence that have intervened in the formation of our knowledge and experience of landscape.

The exhibition is structured in five blocks: Prologue: landscape, doodles, language; Landscape, historicism and the Western canon; Landscape and coloniality; Anthropic landscape, time, memory and Epilogue: dystopian landscape.

In the first of these, "Prologue: landscape, doodles, language".Laura F. Gibellini's work, produced in collaboration with her two-year-old daughter, deals with the first graphic, schematic and imaginative representations of landscapes in children's drawings, from which emerges a vocabulary of signs and symbols that translate more complex and heterogeneous experiences of natural and architectural elements.

At "Landscape, historicism and the Western canon". the works of different artists bring us closer, from a critical perspective, to the first historicist constructions of pictorial genres such as "garden painting", still preserved in the frescoes of Roman villas, as well as to the evolution of these early codes of representation in Renaissance treatises on painting, where a unitary understanding of space was established in the ideal relationship of the subject with the outside world through the concept of the "window-painting". The allusion in other works to the Grand Tour, the trip to Italy that became famous between the 17th and 19th centuries as part of the humanist education of artists and writers, refers to the importance of the Western canon and the imprint of Rome and Italy as the origin of a landscape tradition that would be revised by modern art.

At "Landscape and coloniality". an ideological conception of landscape that reached its highest expression with the establishment of transatlantic imperial frontiers between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is questioned. The imagination of the world as a totality and of unknown lands took shape in Renaissance maps as a projection of an anthropocentric desire to dominate nature. The first exotic, racist and colonial images of Abya Yala or America reached Europe through the far-fetched visions of drawings, paintings and engravings of travelling artists commissioned by the metropolises; and they circulated through postcards and the illustrated press of the time.

In the fourth block, "Anthropic landscape, time, memory". the genealogy of practices linked to specific territories is adopted as a reference. By interacting with technological devices and scientific archives, the artists recover the memory of places. They try to understand the impact of colonisation in spaces that show the traces of the violence of anthropogenic action on the landscape.

"Epilogue: dystopian landscape". closes the exhibition with a pictorial-installation intervention by Rosalía Banet that metaphorises the time of irreversible crisis that this planet is going through, where natural resources are being exhausted and destroyed due to the intensive exploitation of ecosystems and the indiscriminate consumption of global capitalism. A cry for help from bodies and trees devoured by the ecological catastrophe.

Image: Agave / Macaw, 2019. Gabriela Bettini (RAER 2015 / 2016) and KHAMEKAYE. Caax, 2018. Paula Anta (RAER 20111-2012)

Royal Academy of Spain in Rome: 150 years of history

The Spanish Academy in Rome, attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, throughout its century and a half of history, has hosted several generations of Spanish and, since 2001, Latin American artists and intellectuals, promoting and contributing to the development of their projects and achieving a greater Spanish cultural presence in Italy, a better understanding between the cultures of both countries and a greater cultural link between Europe and Latin America.

The institution, which celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2023, was founded in 1873, during the First Republic, by Emilio Castelar. The Academy arose in response to the concerns of artists and intellectuals for whom Rome was an essential destination during the 17th century and especially during the 18th and 19th centuries. Since then, a total of 1050 residents have passed through the institution, making the Academy an essential instrument in Spanish foreign cultural policy.