The concept of landscape is characterized by a semantic ambiguity (Wylie 2007) that is expressed by the different shade of meaning the term takes on when translated into English or German: landscape, or Landschaft, in fact, refers primarily to the actual form assumed in a given time by a portion of territory, while the Italian term “paesaggio”, the Spanish word “paysaje” and the French “paysage” of Latin derivation, indicate rather the image of a place in a painting (D'Angelo 2010). On the one hand, therefore, landscape is a peculiar association of spatial elements, of natural and/or anthropogenic origin, perceived by beholders as an immersive totality suited for inhabitation, but also analysis and comparation (von Humboldt 1845; Sauer 1925); on the other hand, landscape is the result of a cultural mediation able to capture in a given territorial area a certain expressiveness, or Stimmung (Simmel 1914), and therefore to represent it artistically. Broadly speaking, it is also possible to recognize two corresponding human attitudes toward space; on the one hand, landscape is basically a material part of land as perceived  and affectively felt by the inhabiting populations – this is, for instance, the definition of landscape adopted by the European Landscape Convention (2000); on the other hand, landscape is the product of the gaze that the artist, but also an entire community (Croce 1922), projects onto space, imposing on it the styles of vision that are prevailing in her era (Gombrich 1960), together with its values and interests (Cosgrove & Daniels 1989). On the one hand, then, the real and lived landscape, and on the other, the represented and imagined landscape (Lefebvre 1973, Soja 1996). These two dimensions of landscape, however, do not stand against each other in a rigid dualism. The two dimensions intertwine and enliven each other, insofar as representations always stem from engaged encounters between a beholder and space (Taine 1865, Merleau-Ponty 1948) and at the same time contribute to defining the practices and experience of both inhabitants and travellers (Casey 2002). This takes us back to the aesthetic character of the notion of landscape, meaning, by “aesthetic”, the broader dimension of the relationship between sensibility and reality, rather than the narrow dimension of a theory of beauty in art, but. The careful consideration of landscape as, at the same time, the original dimension of common living (Settis 2013, Besse 2020) and a specific art form with an extraordinary impact on general culture (Roger 1997, Milani 2017) involves a more general rethinking of philosophical aesthetics, as anticipated in Italian philosophy by Rosario Assunto (1973) and then supported in the Anglo-Saxon language aesthetics by thinkers like Arnold Berleant (1991, 2002, 2010) and in French cultural geography by authors such as Augustin Berque (2019, 2022) and Jean-Marc Besse (2017).

The importance of perception for the definition of landscape implies the recognition of the plurality of means and languages involved in the formation of such perception in the most diverse contexts. Landscape’s perception is never a neutral fact, but is built in relation to a heritage of representations encoded in various means of expression and sedimented over time.

The call for papers “Landscapes and Media” aims to investigate the mediations in which landscapes are constituted. The forms of mediation in which landscapes are communicated and constructed range from maps to paintings, from land art to place-based performances, from photography to cinema, from novel descriptions to TV series scripts, from images sourced from the tourism industry to those in documentaries and television program reports. The mediation of the image is sometimes properly artistic, as in the case of land art, sometimes linked to obvious marketing needs, as in the case of tourist brochures. In some cases, the mimetic function prevails on the communicative one in order to better correspond to knowledge aims, as is the case in maps, but also in certain ways of considering landscape drawing (think, for example, of Alexander von Humboldt’s use of drawings as tools associated with the analytical description of landscape elements); in other cases, the communicative function prevails over the descriptive/mimetic one, as in the already mentioned case of Instagram images and, looking back in time, postcards. Furthermore, mediation enables a form of “augmentation of being” (Gadamer 1960), as it intensifies the aura of a landscape, highlighting features removed or overlooked by the common gaze (consider the effect that certain songs dedicated to a landscape or place can have), or it can represent a stylization of it (as in the case of maps), a trivialization (as in the case of advertisements) or even an evaporation (such as the Orange County landscape of simulacra in Baudrillard 1981). The call for papers “Landscapes and Media” will be developed in the three sections described below, urging contributors to focus on one of the following topics:

• The mediated character of landscape from a historical-critical point of view. Traces of the awareness of the mediated nature of landscape can be found both in the modern geographical debate, which typically moves from the German morphological and physiognomic tradition (Hettner 1873) to non-representationalist geography (Thrift 2008, Wylie 2013, Boyd & Edwardes 2019), and in the aesthetic debate, which from Ritter (1964) to the contemporary theory of atmospheres (Griffero 2016, 2021) focuses on the relationship between the subject of experience and spatial reality. We welcome contributions that identify, in these plural paths, junctions of particular relevance, represented by authors, debates, comparisons, and general and theoretical arguments.
• The different mediations of landscape. Contributors are invited to reflect on the specific ways in which each medium actually realizes the mediation between subjects of experience and landscapes. In this section, contributions devoted to landscape in maps, paintings and drawings, novels and music, photography (and its social uses, from postcards to the social image) and movies will be accepted, all the way up to digital mediation, which allows each of the previous mediations to be reworked, but also to produce new mediations, as in the case of augmented reality. Contributions can also explore more theoretical topics, such as the differences between natural and human-made landscapes in images, and more empirical ones, related to case studies on specific landscapes, or specific representations of them.
• Aesthetics, ethics and politics of the mediated landscape. Contributors are invited to explore the nexus between landscape representations and concepts such as authenticity, originality, practices, and actions within the landscape itself. What assessments can be made of the current inflation of images related to landscapes in the context of social communication and popular tourism practices? How does territorial marketing interact with the very nature of landscapes and their perception? What mediations are involved in landscape heritage protection and enhancement measures, and what problems does landscape heritagization pose? In what sense can spatial conflicts also be interpreted as conflicts between images, and vice versa? What idiosyncrasies may develop in the contemporary context between different imaginaries related to the same landscape? Again, theoretical or empirical contributions related to particular case studies are welcome.

Abstract submission deadline: December 2023

Contributions submission deadline: June 2024

Length of contributions: 30000 characters (excluding references), to be submitted anonymously, accompanied by a short abstract + a list of 5 keywords, both in English.

Editorial rules are on the website (https://mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/aesthetica-preprint/index)

Send proposals and full texts to your email addresses and in copy to: aestetica.preprint@gmail.com, aestetica.preprint@gmail.com, paolo.dangelo@uniroma3.it, lisa.giombini@uniroma3.it, giacomo.fronzi@uniba.it, leonardo.distaso@unina.it    DO NOT USE THE SUBMISSION FORM ON THE SITE