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The trust that the Landscape Observatory team has given to us has prompted us to write about the landscape without being experts, but rather to take up a place in the world of experimentation, of trial and error, of listening, of ‘doing while it happens’. These are spaces that we recognise as our own in contemporary artistic practice.
We are lucky to have Joan Nogué nearby, a geographer and the founder of the Landscape Observatory. We are close because live less than six kilometres apart and because we maintain a precious conversation with him and Adela, getting the chance to chat with them at least once every season of the year. Starting from local problems that concern us, we talk about water reuse systems, building with wood, forest management, the role of forests, what the great tits eat or if the geese notice the change in weather, which has led to the few raindrops we have seen lately. The conversation twists and turns and we delve into stereotypes and even archetypes in landscape, invisible geographies, unknown landscapes, landscapes you do not see but feel, and we return to Lin Yutang, the Chinese philosopher and writer that we discovered in one of the first conversations with Joan a few years ago. We remember one of his aphorisms, which for us is already a famous phrase: “Half of the beauty of a landscape depends on the landscape itself and the other half on the one who contemplates it”.
We could say that this perceptual and even subjective dimension was our gateway to the landscape. There we felt how these issues intersected with our work, with our practice and with our understanding of culture, art and even life. As Joan explains, “the landscape is at the same time signified and signifier, content and container, reality and fiction". However, we could swap the word landscape with painting, theatre or even cinema. This is how we say that based on certain socially agreed values, individual and subjective emotions can be produced, which allow for different collective readings. This analogy, which may seem obvious, inspired enough curiosity in us to support a line of artistic research around landscape to this day. Thus, the exhibition ‘Canvi d’aires’ (“Change of air”) (Casa Elizalde Visual Arts Award 2019) contained reflections straddling the landscapes of Colombia and Mieres (Girona). Pulling the thread, in 2021 we started a new longitudinal study called Invisible Geographies. We have been fortunate that the Landscape Observatory has welcomed us with infinite kindness, allowing us access to materials from the Documentation Centre and letting us converse with various people on the premises, note down references from other works and ask questions for months. This is a good guide to create a new work that we have called ‘Desenfocar l’anècdota’ (“Taking focus off the anecdote”), which can be visited at La Garrotxa Museum, in the same building where the Landscape Observatory of Catalonia is located, from 10 February to 21 April 2024.
We therefore want this brief text to help to promote spaces of shared and transdisciplinary knowledge like what we have been able to experience. We feel that compartments are often watertight between disciplines that could easily enjoy a fluid back-and-forth between them. In fact, a ‘watertight compartment’ is “each of the independent sections of a ship’s hull that prevent it from sinking, even if one of them is flooded”. Considering the ecosocial crisis we are experiencing, we think it is up to us to open channels of contact and transmission to create communicating vessels that may give us enough stability to keep the ship from sinking.
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