In this text, related to Rimini Protocol’s piece Shared LandscapeI want to discuss, whether and inhowfar it is possible to work with a notion of landscape without romanticizing historically specific nature-cultures. Landscape as a concept is deeply embedded with the dialectics of “modernity”. Landscape refers to an idea of humanly inhabited nature (quite often human interventions are visible in landscape-paintings) as something that can be consumed as an art work and that is therefore aesthetically contained. Georg Simmel in the early 20th century already thought of landscape-painting as an exemplary case of cultural production that he contrasted sharply with the entangled and radically related dynamism of nature-without-human:

“By nature we mean 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. (…) To talk of ‘a piece of nature’ is in fact a selfcontradiction. Nature is not composed of pieces. It is the unity of a whole. The instant anything is parceled out from this wholeness, it is no longer nature pure and simple since this whole can be ‘nature’ only within that unbounded unity, only as a wave within that total flux. As far as landscape is concerned, however, a boundary, a way of being encompassed by a momentary or permanent field of vision, is quite essential.”[1]

Landscape is definitely a romantic concept and landscape-painting is an exemplary case of the selfcontradition Simmel talks about: It is literally a “piece of nature”, it is “herausgestückt”, a neologism Simmel uses to combine notions of packaging and punching out. That which is desired as a whole in flux is “parceled out”, “herausgestückt”. The bourgeois mode of reception towards “pieces of nature” routinely is “gawking romantically” (as Bertolt Brecht famously mocked) instead of accepting the opaqueness of what is going on beyond and underneath one’s own possibilities of perception. Landscape paintings do not threaten or challenge human agency, nor do they tell interesting stories about the reality of nature-cultural relations: about injustice of property-ownership, about state regulations, about hard agricultural work, or about the drama of the loss of the commons. Landscapes are – as additional obstacles – connected with identitary politics, regionalism and the invention of tourism and the idea of leisure. So, how is it possible to rework the concept in a way that it supports the need to question euro- and anthropocentric ideas of nature attuned to the current situation of multiple crisis? Is it possible to twist the concept to such an extent that it allows for more interesting, more nuanced, more historically grounded stories about how humans and non-humans live and die together?[2]

Recently, Sigrid Adorf, Ines Kleesattel and Leonie Süess proposed a conceptual move from landscape as a noun to “landscaping oneself”[3], giving the multiple practices of “landscaping”[4] a decidedly situated twist, a twist I want to retrace and employ as I take walk in the woods and across meadows with Shared Landscape and by asking where and how it succeeds in unromanticizing the concept of landscape (and where it doesn’t).

I want to start with something that cannot be experienced by the audience: the production process that faces all the challenges that are notcovered by the concept of landscape. A landscape suggests it is simply there. It lures into being contemplated on, it might play with the sublime, or – quite the opposite – it tames that which cannot be mastered by way of shrinking the dimensions. In contrast, when it comes to producing a live show in the forest and in the fields, nothing is readily available for consumption. The aim of producing an ecologically attuned piece of art enters conflictual constellations that are related to landownership and competing ideas of land-use. In the St. Pölten/Pyrha case the selected place, the Probstwald, proofed to not be identical with it being “a” landscape: It turned out, that 38 parties owned the land, 50 additional persons were integrated in the water pipeline cooperative. The water pipeline runs through the territory an guarantees water for the city of Vienna. Bringing these stakeholders to an agreement for the usage was hard enough, but then another group took the stage: The association of hunters that invests into leases and conceives of itselve as playing a central role in maintaining the ecological equilibrium by shooting old (male) animals and by otherwise protecting the deer population. While the landowners agreed to allow the usage of their lands for relatively little money, the hunter’s demand for compensation was that of whole years lease. They argued that the fragile equilibrium of the deer population would be massively disrupted as the show was scheduled for the time of birthgiving and hunting. I don’t want question the pecuniary adequacy of the demand here, I am interested in the structure of their argument. Other than the artist’s that come to “parcel out” a piece of nature for temporary use, they claim to be the custodians of a whole: the life-cycle of deer, related to the well-being of the forest. Although for urban dwellers it might come as a surprise that those dedicated to killing animals present themselves as part of nature, their argument is not totally of: Indeed, a theater-performance as part of a festivalis an invasion; it is a humble one, done with utmost carefulness, but still: it transforms a nature-cultural-constellation in a landscape for a while. It is performing landscape in the strictest of all senses: By using the territory (and the airspace) as a theatre, they are literally made a landscape, ready to be presented to an art audience.

But let’s take a walk now. In Pyrha, the piece starts with high-tech cows. The first sight offered is an insight into animal husbandry of the 21st century: A large barn full with hundreds of cows and up-to-date technology, tailored to both animal-well-being and productiveness. Entering the forest it is clear that this is a heavily used and cultivated environment: traces of silviculture (of planting and harvesting wood) are visible in abundance. When the first piece starts, I am already attuned to the forest and the voices in my ear, that invite me to meditate about the many aspects of the meaning of a forest, are very welcome: it’s usefulness, it’s beauty, it’s vulnerability, it’s symbolic layers. And then the sound of the wind instruments, a first time, a second time, a third time, a fourth time – it opens my ear and my imagination for the polyvocality of humans in relation with this territory. When I am asked to co-perform a drama of loss of attachment to the woods I get angry. I am not in need of origin stories of mankind and of nostalgia, I am in need of a new idea of landscape. I am moved emotionally and cognitively by a story of space-travel and longing, taking place in front of a romantic coulisse hung between the trees. VR makes me stomach-sick, but the story of how political borders are drawn by economic interests is important, especially as we are in a straight aisle in the woods that houses Vienna’s water pipeline. I learn about the drama of EU agricultural politics as out of an amazing tractor an amazing performer emerges. She perfectly embodies joy and sorrow of a contemporary agricultural business-woman, so many paradoxes live in this person, as many as in anyone of us. When Gaia starts complaining and her accusations, I turn my ears and eyes inward. If she wanted to speak to humans, she wouldn’t do it this way, this I am sure about; and I find myself – instead of listening/watching – wondering about neo-romantic tendencies in New Materialism, including the use of tropes of the sublime. There is a tendency, also in the Anthropocene discourse, to get lost or stuck in tropes of the non-graspable, the too big or too small dimensionality of objects and dynamics, in timespans, that are beyond human perspectives. All to often, cosmological narratives are combined with somatic-experiments that promise a re-connection with the world-beyond-humans. That’s very romantic.

While rethinking this experience I remember Édouard Glissants list of relations[5]that he sketches for the colonial situation. Can we use them to rethink the nature-culture of forests and fields? Let’s give it a try:

Relationships of domination

For example: building a dirt-road or fence in the forest, keeping out artists, using chemical fertilizers to increase production but ruin the soil

Relationships of fascination

For example: the rhythms of becoming, wondering about age and ages, watching the industriousness of the ants

Relationships of multiplicity or contagion

For example: sympoetic relations of funghi, soil and animals including humans collecting mushrooms, bitten by a tick again, the bite becomes inflamed, a close look to the forest’s floor

Relationships of polite subservience or mockery

For example: the hunter’s camouflage, the hunter’s dogs, birds imitating tractors and machines

Relationships of tangency

For example: music in the woods, the techno-cow-barn adjacent to the forest, Caspar-David-Friedrich hung in the trees

Relationships of subversion

For example: This is what art always claims it does. I leave it to You whether You buy it.

Relationships of intolerance

For example: the hunters don’t want the theatre to happen, the birds flee the music, my skin (unfortunately) does not like too much sun

Can we imagine an artwork that “landscapes” and provokes the one perceiving “to landscape him/herself” a new? That talks about the often contradictory layerdness and historicity of relationships within the territory? To address the already shaped landscape as part of the activity of landscaping is a first step for sure, to not use it as a backdrop (only) is the necessary second. The third is probably to give up on the idea of mastery and control. It is a hard one, given that art-making is embedded in structures that afford art to “work”: to attract an audience, to be interesting (for humans), to be written and talked about. Let’s talk about the fourth and fifth step, after having made this one. For sure Bertolt Brecht was dead serious with his aim of overcoming the theatre as dispositive that produces an “romantically gawking” audience, as serious as many artists today are with the desire to overcome human-centeredness in art-making. But this quite often successfully fails because a certain extent of mastery and control is the prerequisite of commodification, of an income, of a place in the art-world. No art without pracitices of herausstücken. Successful failure is all we get right now, unromanticized art is still to come.

Reference
[1]Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Landscape, trans. by Josef Bleicher, in: Theory, Culture & Society 2007, 24:7-8, 20-29, here: 21.

[2] It is not hard to guess, that my reflections are inspired by Donna Haraways book: Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham 2016.

[3]Sigrid Adorf, Ines Kleesattel, Léoni Süess, Landscaping Oneself—In Relational Practices, Insert, Editorial #5, 2024. https://insert.art/ausgaben/sich-verlandschaften/editorial/

[4]Landscaping as a verb was already proposed in William J. Thomas Mitchell, Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2002.

[5] Éduard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, Minnesota, 1997, p. 104-05.