LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND POETICS. FROM STILL IMAGE TO MOVEMENT

Edited by Rita Messori, Katia Botta, Serena Massimo, Emma Pavan

The imposition of the question of the environment within cultural policies and public sensibilities has led to a real reconfiguration of the question of landscape. Does it still make sense to talk about landscape when the relationship between man and nature is increasingly explained and regulated from an “environmental” perspective? What is the relationship between landscape and environment? And, above all, what do we mean by landscape today?
The primary objective of this monographic issue of ‘Aesthetica Preprint’ is to restore the original aesthetic meaning of the concept of landscape. In fact, from the very beginning of its history, the term has had a double meaning. If we think in particular of the Romantic period, landscape is on the one hand the pictorial representation of a part of nature; on the other hand, it is the sensory-perceptual and affective experience, culminating in the contemplative- spectatorial vision of a part of nature that has become a spectacle. Such an iconic model of landscape is still very much present in the popular imagination.
In recent decades, the aesthetic statute of the contemplative type of landscape has been repeatedly questioned, in an attempt to replace a distanced, frontal gaze – closely linked to a fixed image – with the embodied gaze of an aesthetic subject, sensitive and self-propelled, immersed in a phenomenal nature in a state of perpetual flux. The crisis of the contemplative paradigm has in fact led to a rethinking of both the subject of experience and the nature being experienced. The aesthetic relationship between man and nature is now conceived in a radically different way: from the primacy of vision to the multimodality of feeling; from being at a distance, face-to-face relationship between subject and object, to a constantly interweaving of reciprocal implications; from the fixity of the point of view and the geometric construction of space to movement and, in particular, the rhythm of walking which opens up and traces, step by step, its own path, a path through which the landscape is formed.
The landscape thus seems to be delineated as the simultaneous unity, felt and at the same time activated by various forms of mediation, by cultural and artistic practices, between the bodily movement of man and the movement of natural forms; an encounter between man and nature that takes place within formative directions of meaning that take up and accompany each other, that contrast and adjust with each other.
The encounter with the other, be it human or non-human, natural or artificial, becomes decisive; it is in the plurality and variety of encounters – and the interactional practices they entail – that the landscape is given. If the environment – understood here as “Umwelt” – is the space-time of life, with its practices and habits, the landscape becomes the opening, in aesthetic experience, of new and unexpected possibilities of co-habitation and co-existence; possibilities felt aesthetically and expressed artistically, which require the laborious work of dialogue, mediation, the invention of a momentum and a “common orientation”, implying new formative strategies, that is, a kind of “shared poietics”. A “shared poietics” that can be put to the test by catastrophic or war events, or that can involve forms of abandonment or destruction of familiar places, of uprooting from one’s environment; or forms of return, of unprecedented cultural “grafts”, of reactivating a repressed past, with a view to “reorienting” and a reconfiguring the aesthetic-poetic practices that give meaning to the relationship between man and nature; which, ultimately, create the landscape.

GUIDELINES AND DEADLINES
Abstracts and full papers should be sent to the following addresses: rita.messori@uninsubria.it - bottakatia@gmail.com - massimoserenak@gmail.com - emmapav95@gmail.com

ABSTRACTS
Deadline for abstract submission: March 15, 2027 (notification of acceptance will be sent by April 15)
Length of abstract for submission of proposal: max. 2,000 characters (including spaces)

FINAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Deadline for submission of full paper: July 30, 2027
Accepted languages: English, German, French, Italian
Full paper length: max. 35,000 characters (including spaces and bibliography) ready for the double-blind peer review process, accompanied by an abstract and five keywords in English