Shared Landscapes, curated by Caroline Barneaud and Stefan Kaegi, offers us a durational ambulatory experience amid and with «landscapes» between “field and forest”, between «nature» and art, throughout which we encounter seven performances that are intended as “seven «variations on landscape»”. It invites us to «enter» the «landscape», to collectively pay attention to our surroundings, to «share the landscape».

The word «landscape», chosen by the curators, speaks to the historicity of the contemplation of «nature» as it developed in Europe and, therefore, also to an Euro- centric idea of «Nature»; it also speaks to the historicity of pictorial practices, the emergence of the technique of perspective, its use in painting, and the way it shaped a specific way of looking, framing the «outside world», turning it into a picture. The history of this word is closely intertwined with the dualities of modernity: the separation between sensibility and understanding, the emergence of subjectivity and its opposition to «Nature». The idea of «landscape» carries with it the image of a distanced observation of the world, more precisely, of the «natural» world and its reduction to an image, its reification as a backdrop available for contemplation and human action. This image, now a cliché, still permeates some current visual and epistemological practices, and even our daily lives; it still has an effect.

At the same time, a number of authors have been reclaiming the word and the notion of landscape, incorporating reflections on ecology, the complexity of human and non-human perception, and recognising that humans are not the only builders and destroyers of the places that they inhabit along with non-human ways of life and non-living modes of existence. This recognition suggests that «nature» and culture are inseparable. Contemporary artistic practices have also contributed to this reclaiming and re-signifying of the notion of landscape, and Shared Landscapes does this as well.

Can this word, landscape, with its problematic history, its twists and turns, and its field of semantic tensions, contribute to recognising and experiencing different ways of relating to the becoming of the world — ways that are “material and semiotic”1, historical and more-than-human? Can it take part in concrete stories that are able to account for and arouse the imagination of the multiple spatialities that the “open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life”2 make up?

Let us start by invoking Georg Simmel's 1913 essay Philosophie der Landschaft, in which «landscape» is established as a philosophical category and problem for the first time. Simmel proposes an initial distinction between «landscape», an “ideational formation”, and «nature», defined as “the infinite interconnectedness of objects, the uninterrupted creation and destruction of forms, the flowing unity of an event that finds expression in the continuity of temporal and spatial existence”3. For Simmel, «nature» without humans is dynamic, interconnected, creative, and, we might even add, autopoietic. The emergence of «landscape» involves splitting it open and extracting a piece from it, an operation initiated by “a momentary or permanent field of vision”4 that determines the frame. Landscape arises “when a range of natural phenomena spread over the surface of the earth is comprehended by a particular kind of unity”5. If the “material foundation or its individual pieces may simply be regarded as nature”6, «landscape», as a “sense- perceptual unit”, requires “the human gaze that divides things up and forms the separated parts into specific unities”7. In other words, it entails a triple human act of observation, analysis and synthesis; it, therefore, correlates with the emergence of the importance of subjectivity.

As a recent historical and cultural formation, landscape is a symptom of modernity’s fragmented and dualistic condition, it “only comes into being in a process whereby the Life that pulsates within our perceptions and emotions tears itself away from the homogeneity of nature”8. This dialectic of modernity, in which human subjectivity detaches from and opposes «nature» without humans, is, according to Simmel, the fundamental tragedy of modern culture. However, this very condition “produces the conciliatory richness of landscape”9, a self-contained formation that at the same time remains intertwined with the “infinite expansiveness” and the “continual flux” of nature without humans10. For Simmel, landscape is made and remade with each contemplative act, which simultaneously apprehends “the mood (Stimmung11) that a landscape projects at us and through which we comprehend it” and, in a “unifying move”, causes it to emerge as such in its singularity12. By uniting beholder and beheld in an atmosphere of unity, each time with a different pitch, landscape makes it possible to reconnect, in fragmentary modulations, what was separate: humans and nature-without-humans.

Can we revisit and shift the concept of landscape in such a way that it continues to make sense outside the dialectic of modernity in which it is rooted? We have seen how Simmel sought in the “conciliatory richness of landscape” the possibility of a reconnection between humans and non-human modes of existence, although he phrased it differently. That is not enough; we need to deconstruct, shift and overturn «landscape».

Let us begin, in the company of Tim Ingold, to make an attempt to shift and overturn the concept of landscape. Is it possible to have a different relationship with «landscape», to be with and within the landscape at the same time as we perceive it, thus being-with-the-landscape? If landscape entails a presence that perceives it, can that presence be non- human?

Departing from an ecological consideration of perception, Ingold argues that, like imagination, perception neither begins with a stimulus nor ends with an image. On the contrary, “they continue”,13 and so “to perceive, as to imagine, is to participate from within in the perpetual self-making of the world. It is to join with a world in which things do not so much exist as occur, each along its own trajectory of becoming.”14 For Ingold, landscape is closely linked to inhabiting the world; it is “the world as it is known to those who dwell therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them”15.

And it is not only humans who inhabit the world and participate in its becoming; “so do animals, trees, mountains, mud and water, in so far as in their growth, movements and displacements they continually and mutually respond to each other's presence — or in a word, they correspond”,16 all while maintaining “their own distinct trajectories”17. To imagine a landscape is, therefore, for Ingold, “to enter into correspondence with it”18; the apprehension of a landscape lies in the “never-ending, contrapuntal interweaving of material flows and sensory awareness”19.

Ingold's interpretation negates the possibility of us humans placing ourselves in the perspective of an observer outside the events of the world; we are immersed in a field of correspondences and resonances that tumultuously make up a landscape. Furthermore, his revisiting of landscape isn’t limited to human, aesthetic apprehension; on the contrary, it takes place in a continuous interweaving of living humans, living non-humans and non-living existences, that resonate with each other without, however, merging.

Nevertheless, if each of these presences is equipped with different “active perceptual systems, building on translations”, and particular ways of perceiving — each with a partial and specific way of organising worlds, as Donna Haraway reminds us20 — won't a landscape resonate differently for each of them? Can the notion of landscape discard the need for a point of view, even a non-human one? The need for a point of life, to use a wording coined by Emanuele Coccia, who claims that “meeting it [the world], knowing it, speaking it means always to live according to a certain form, starting from a certain style”21?

If we discard it, will the notions of landscape and place still differ? According to Doreen Massey, whom Ingold also invites into his interpretative web, “places are collections of ongoing trajectories, of «stories-so-far», articulations within the wider power-geometries of space”22. Their singularity comes from the distinct way in which these trajectories — human and non-human, living and non-living — interact in processes of interconnection, contamination, interference, confrontation and exclusion, and from the becoming of these linkages. Are the notions of landscape and place interchangeable? I leave that question open.

Letting go of the need for a point of view so that the landscape can emerge is an important shift, as it negates the need for an initial causality, whether human or not. This shift allows us to see how each participant, in their own becoming, contributes to the landscape’s making — to the ever-changing pattern that emerges from their reciprocity between them and, what is more, to the way in which the interweaving and the encounters shape these presences, producing them in turn. It allows us to understand how becoming is always becoming with. “The partners do not precede the knotting; species of all kinds are consequent upon worldly subject- and object-shaping entanglements.”23

We are not in control, not even of ourselves. We are contaminated by each new encounter. In the company of Anna Tsing and of matsutake mushrooms, we recognise the vulnerability that runs through us — precarity as a condition of life. “A precarious world is a world without teleology.” Indeterminacy, exposure to implacable contingency, can be frightening, but “thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.”24


Consider, for example, the changes in the Earth's atmosphere that allow us to breathe today. Through photosynthesis, cyanobacteria caused an accumulation of oxygen that radically altered the Earth's pre-biotic atmosphere. This «great oxidation» led to the extinction of numerous anaerobic life forms and probably caused a mass extinction. At the same time, however, this oxygen-rich atmosphere paved the way for countless complex life forms. The many world-building projects overlap, contaminate, and divert each other.

Matsutake mushrooms, which accompany Anna Tsing's research and writing, appear in forests devastated by the timber industry. Their appearance in Japan was contingent on human disturbance of forest ecosystems, since their most common host is the Japanese red pine (Pinus densiflora), a tree that germinates in mineral soils exposed to sunlight due to deforestation. As Anna Tsing tells us, in areas where forests have been able to regenerate, trees with broad leaves shade the pines, preventing them from growing or even germinating. The matsutake disappear. These mushrooms are part of “disturbance- based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest”25.

Like the matsutake mushrooms that guided Tsing and all forms of life and modes of non- living existence, we are immersed in “a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs”26. As the image of the mosaic suggests, “nothing is connected to everything, but everything is connected to something”27. We are joined on this journey by Donna Haraway.

These open constellations of more-than-human encounters are always specific, historical, and ever changing. They are relational; they do not consist of self-contained units interacting with each other. Instead, they are always collaborations based on encounters — a making-with. This is about Sympoiesis, as Donna Haraway names these “complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems”.

Can the notions of landscape and place acknowledge the complexity and interweaving of these mosaics of open assemblages of entangled ways of life, always historically situated, always specific? Can they be considered ever-changing spatiotemporal patternings constructed through making-with, in collaborations based on encounters, even as they shape these collaborations?
                           

Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway take into account that these stories of collaboration involve “survivors in histories of greed, violence, and environmental destruction”28. The situated practices that articulate these assemblages in the confusing complexity of living and dying are “as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as beginnings”29.

The differences between positions, stances, perspectives, languages, and practices in these entanglements of historically situated terrestrial co-presences are significant. As Haraway reminded us back in 1988, these differences require “decoding and trans- coding”, “translation and criticism”30, which will always be partial and imperfect, and involve relations of “power-charged social (...) «conversation»”31.

In the Chthulucene, the composition of these positions has been recomposed and rewoven: “human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story. However, the doings of situated, actual human beings matter.”32 They are crucial for the many creatures, human and non-human, that are being “subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness”33.

These human and more-than-human relationships, in their entanglements of terrestrial co-presences, “are always situated, somewhere and not nowhere, entangled and worldly”34. What do their spatialities, their places, look like, not understood as «containers», but as patternings in perpetual fine-tuning, outlined in the making-with of the terrestrial, biophysical, technological, and semiotic creatures that inhabit them — both weaving them and being woven by them? What “tensions, resonances, transformations, resistances, and complicities”35 run through them? What “practices of domination” and “unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions”36 constitute these “field of material-semiotic meaning making”37? Can the word «landscape» invoke all this complexity?

After all this wandering, prompted by the rethinking and reconfiguring of the notion and concept of landscape, which has stretched beyond it, let us return to Shared Landscapes and the ambulatory and performative experience it offers. How does it contribute to re- signifying the notion of landscape and awaken us to these entanglements of terrestrial co-presences, their compositions and recompositions?

I experienced Shared Landscapes three times in three different places, the last one at Quinta do Pisao, near Cascais, a place amid which I «immersed myself», with which I found myself, in a situated research mode for a few months. The bus dropped us off at the entrance to Quinta do Pisao, and we walked up a dirt track, under the hot sun of a late June afternoon, between a slope of dense forest and a grassy area bearing an auspicious name, «Chao da Boa Esperança» [Ground of Good Hope]. Already perspiring, we arrived at the site of the first piece — a spot where I had lingered on several occasions, watching the dance of light filtered through the treetops over the ground, covered in leaves, dry branches, and logs lying around; I would sit on one of these dead decaying logs that wait for the matter to return to the soil, to the earth, while listening to the birds and the rustling caused by small scurrying animals, which seldom let themselves be seen. Contemplation can be a whole-body activity, one that requires us to immerse ourselves in what is being contemplated, to attune to its rhythms and adjust to its demands, as Walter Benjamin argued in the 1920s38; it can contribute to acknowledging our involvement in more-than-human relationships.

On the day of Shared Landscapes, there were no more logs lying around, they had been removed to make space for humans to lie down. In Stefan Kaegi's piece, our bodies lay down amidst the woods, listening to the same voices in our ears. A conversation that had taken place in that very spot, but at another time, about what a forest can be, the trees that shade us, the young oaks and strawberry trees, the cork oaks and pines that already lived there before the ecological rehabilitation of this area, and the fires that threaten them; I couldn’t tell whether the birds I heard were present in that moment or came from the recorded conversation, or whether the sound of the cars at the race track was synchronous with my presence or not; the soundscapes became entangled. We began to be-with the landscape.

While still lying down, the sound of wind instruments resonated among the trees, playing with the rhythms and aural tones of the non-human presences, adding to the existing polyphony, playing with resonances, harmonies and dissonances. Ari Benjamin Meyers’ piece, which we encountered at various moments along the route, invited us to listen to the «landscape», recognising ourselves amid it. We inhabited the landscape.

After a short walk, we came across a canvas stretched between two trees, displaying a reproduction of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Rocky Reef on the Sea Shore. We sat in front of this romantic pictorial landscape, glimpsing pine trees, strawberry trees, and rocky outcrops in the background; the «landscapes» entwined with one another. From the body of two speakers on the sides of the canvas, a voice reflected on the history of contemplating landscape, and told the story of an astronaut with a non-normative body. Meanwhile, a performer moved forwards, between us and the canvas, which she continued to contemplate. Her movement was elegant and deliberate, an earthly dance of a political, non-normative body. The voice coming out of the speakers continued its reflection, and I realised that it wanted to show us the impossibility of a sovereign human gaze upon the landscape, the impossibility of a ableist gaze upon bodies, that it wanted to make us see those abysses. Yet it took away the place of speech from the performer before us. We heard a «disembodied» voice reading what the authors, Chiara Bersani & Marco D'Agostin, had written. Only after the sound piece ended did the performer address us directly. She invited us closer, and began a conversation, but time was up, we had to move on to the next performance.

A line of bricks on the ground; on them, virtual reality devices that lifted us off the ground and allowed us to see the «landscape» from above, giving us a drone's view for a few minutes; my body reacted to this perceptual deception, I felt dizzy. I read a text about mining and how capitalist extractivism redraws borders, supported by the visions of technological devices, by the gaze I had just experienced. Begum Erciyas & Daniel Kotter’s piece did not intertwine me with this «landscape» I inhabited, but it did make me think about the practices of division, appropriation, extraction, and exclusion that shape territories.

The next piece required our participation: we listened to different instructions and split into two groups. Were we two «new-age» groups in the forest, two communities of different species, a psychedelic herd? Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz guided us by both talking in our ear and to each other: first drawing ecological and geopolitical parallels with the arrangement we had formed there, at that moment, and then engaging us in a game that, although it spoke of origin stories, which don't particularly interest me, was far more than that. It was an invitation to play, to make believe, to let ourselves be enchanted. It was a game that sharpened our attention to details of things, of events, to the more-than-human connections we can weave. We wove-with the landscape we inhabited.

After a collective picnic where which we exchanged views on our experiences, we sat down on a hillside that served as a natural amphitheatre. From a distance, we could see the landscape, which became a scenery for contemplation. The actresses, heard through our headphones, were also part of the landscape. They discussed issues of European agricultural policies as they got closer, moving out of the background and becoming figures in the foreground. This play between background and figure continued as a tractor and another performer entered the scene, shifting the conversation to Quinta do Pisao. Emilie Rousset wove a story between European regulations, the sounds of the drosophila fly, and the birth of Uranus, a Miranda donkey, in Pisao, entangling everything.

When the next piece began, a red line on the hillside in front of me changed colour and subtitles appeared, at first reminding us of what we had experienced throughout the day, challenging our perspective on events, reminding us that ours was one of many positions in this com-position of ways of life, practices and languages. Did the trees laugh at us as we tried to imitate them, like children playing? Who saw whom? Who can see? In this piece, the El Conde de Torrefiel collective invited us to imagine that the narrow screen and the accompanying sound piece translated and decoded the language of an entity — Gaia, physis, nature, the Earth — as it narrated the story of the world and humanity. This reversal of perspective could be powerful, but I still question the legitimacy of this translation. Why would Gaia, whom I imagine as multiple, deliver an all-encompassing «grand narrative» in the style of Modern History as told by White Men? And what is more, use a tone that was both accusatory and patriarchal? At a certain point I stopped reading and turned my attention away from the screen to the accelerated movement of the grey clouds in the darkening sky. I wandered. The spectres haunting this particular «landscape» began to loom, the atmosphere of violence and death that has also shaped it. In these rolling pastures, where a performance now attempted to translate Gaia as if speaking from the perspective of a White Man, I couldn’t help but imagine the people who had worked the estate’s fields under the threat armed policemen who watched over them. “The doings of situated, actual human beings matter”, Haraway reminds us. People considered to be outside the norm, often diagnosed with mental health problems, were imprisoned in the Pisao Agricultural Colony and forced to work the land, this land that we walk on today. The history of this specific place resonates with the interrelations between conceptions of marginalisation and the structures of social control and repression of the Estado Novo, the Portuguese dictatorial regime. This place carries memories of human and more-than-human practices and relations of domination, of paradigms of hierarchisation and separation of bodies.

The Shared Landscapes experience invited us to be-with the landscape that we cohabited throughout the day, to attend to more-than-human presences and entanglements, to question the practices that shape and are shaped by the spatialities we inhabit, and to reflect on ways of looking at the world — even when some of the pieces disturbed us.

Reference

1 Donna J. Haraway, 1988, «Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective», Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, n.3 p. 595.
2 Anna Leuwenhaup Tsing, 2015, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, p. 4.
3 Georg Simmel 2007 [1913], «The Philosophy of Landscape», Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 24 /7-8), pp. 21, 28.
4 Id. Ibidem. p. 21.
5 Id. Ibidem. p. 26.
6 Id. Ibidem. p. 21.
7 Georg Simmel 2007, p. 22, 23.
8 Id. Ibidem. p. 23.
9 Id. Ibidem. p. 23.
10 Id. Ibidem. p. 22.
11 In the original, Stimmung, the German word for harmony, relates to musical harmony, but also to pitch, mood, tone and atmosphere.
12 Georg Simmel 2007, p. 27.
13 Tim Ingold 2012, Imagining Landscapes. Past, Present and Future, Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, p. 6.
14 Tim Ingold 2012, p. 14.
15 Tim Ingold 2002, The Perception of the Environment. Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, London and New York: Routledge, p. 193.
16 Tim Ingold 2012, p. 14.
17 Tim Ingold 2012, p. 15.
18 Tim Ingold 2012, p. 14.
19 Tim Ingold 2012, p. 16.
20 Donna J. Haraway 1988, p. 583.
21 Emanuele Coccia 2019, The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 26.
22 Doreen Massey 2005, For Space, London: Sage Publications, p. 131.
23 Donna J. Haraway 2016, Staying with the trouble. Making king in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 13.
24 Anna L. Tsing 2015, p. 20.
25 Anna L. Tsing 2015, pp. 5, 6; italics in the original.
26 Anna L. Tsing 2015, p. 4.
27 Donna J. Haraway 2016, p. 31.
28 Anna L. Tsing 2015, p. 33.
29 Donna J. Haraway 2016, p. 10.
30 Donna J. Haraway 1988, pp. 590.
31 Donna J. Haraway 1988, pp. 593.
32 Donna J. Haraway 2016, p. 55.
33 Donna J. Haraway 2016, p. 55.
34 Donna J. Haraway 2016, p. 4.
35 Donna J. Haraway 1988, p. 588.
36 Donna J. Haraway 1988, pp. 579.
37 Donna J. Haraway 2016, p. 110.
38 Walter Benjamin, 2019, [1924-1925], «Epistemo-Critical Forward» to Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, pp. 2-3.