“Shared Landscapes” raises the question of how landscapes can become palpable as commonly shared, entangled and intertwined worlds. Or in other words, how can we more comprehensibly understand that collectively produced natural spaces are not simply existing, passive sceneries for active, autonomous subjects? This question is of particular interest for processes of becoming and articulating subjectivity in the present time. Because something fundamental has changed. In the “Chthulucene” (Haraway 1995) processes of formation (Bildung) can no longer be conceived as solitary-human developments. Rather, subjectivities occur through material constellations and “assemblages” (Delanda 2016). In a post-foundational world, positions, positionalities and epistemologies (cf. Anderl 2024) arise from constellations and gatherings of human as well as non-human elements, architectures and orderings – for instance, arrangements of public spaces, squares, parks and nature-culture landscapes (cf. Krüger et al. 2023).

Here (here!) we speak and act about positionalities. Here we pose questions about emplacements in the world which are of crucial importance for current societal challenges. Especially because the ‘being-in-the-world’ has fallen out of its modern self-evidence, how can we articulate subjectivity and how can we orientate in a post-fundamental world? More than ever, in the midst of overlapping planetary crises, there are questions of how we collectively share the world, which (material) practices lead to certain divisions of the world (e.g., the “Imperialistic Way of Life” (Brand/Wissen 2017)) and what alternatives exist to the world’s current divisions and subdivisions.

Although discussion regarding existential challenges is increasingly gaining significance, two crucial areas remain vague, especially from an educational perspective. Firstly, almost all contributions demand that education and processes of becoming subjects must be conceived in a more entangled (“diffractive” (Haraway 2018)) manner (cf. Meißner 2019; Scherrer 2021). However, the specific form of entanglement, often featured as ‘education-with’, ‘becoming-with’ is mentioned only briefly here and there by way of an empty reference. Hence, there is secondly a lack of concretisation. If the concept of becoming subjects needs to be rethought at the beginning of the 3rd millennium, corresponding spaces and practices of placemaking must be mapped out and experimentally explored.

Accordingly, “Shared Landscapes” addresses this sociocultural and political desideratum. For this purpose, performative-immersive settings were curated in hybrid/rural areas. Landscapes (as societal spaces) were stripped of their passive scenographic nature so as to clarify their contribution to the articulation of self and world relations. This approach to productive, topological (as opposed to topographical), space-generating practices is literally groundbreaking for educational and subjectification processes. Hence, the aforementioned questions regarding subjective perspectives on the world can be replaced by questions concerning concrete, material positionalities and arrangements within and with the world.

Where are we? At the dawn of the third millennium, the question “Where am I?” (Latour 2021) assumed existential significance. This does not concern the position that humans occupy on the planet like taking a position in a cartesian space. Moreover, it has become questionable whether the classically modern framework of self-world relations remains tenable. We are not lost in space, but rather we have lost our placemaking (cf. Page 2020), as our modern measurement of the world is increasingly revealing itself as a “frame error” (Dreyfus/Taylor 2016, p. 12). This error lies in assuming a given human-environment or nature-culture dualism. The active, intentionally acting, shaping human makes his history on the stage of an existing (historically formed) environment, a nature that itself does not develop its own agency, insofar as it pursues no purposes. Various studies have shown that this juxtaposition is by no means a straightforwardly assumable constellation. The dualism man-landscape or man-world in particular is the effect of a specific, sense-generating, sense-modulating, societal bundle of practices (cf. Foucault 1974; Latour 2008, 2014). This means that positioning it is not about the distribution of subjects and objects in specific, container-like spaces. Instead, nature, landscapes, as well as the associated perspectives and positions coalesce as an effect of socio-cultural, material modulation-processes (cf. Schatzki 2002). Furthermore, there is no given inside, no ‘brain-in-a-tank’. The associated “production of the interior” (Saave 2022) within the material assemblages – the subjective perspective – has been identified as a condition for processes of the economisation of life (cf. Moore 2020). We are not naturally inside a skull which is positioned in an outside world.

Here we could realise that we are (for ourselves and in common being) an effect of the fabrication of space. Here – here – we could realise that the consequences of the existing modern neoliberal spatial production are serious. Through this “spatial cut” (Massey 2003, p. 31) emerges a modulated political epistemology, a political “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2008). The powerful, material installation of spatial geometries (“power-geometries” (Massey 1993, 1999)) not only enables partial exclusions of the “inaudible” (Rancière 2002), but in a globalised variant, it also entails a specific dislocation of the local, an abstracting generalisation of place (cf. Casey 1993, 1998) and thus, a territorialisation of landscapes. “Pluriverses” (Escobar 2017, 2020; cf. Querejazu 2016) have been transformed into metricised, scalable surface units (cf. Tsing 2009, 2019). Places have been transformed into spaces as containers; an articulated culture (of the humanist Homo) has been juxtaposed against a potentially exploitable nature (as a resource). The self-conception of the Western, consuming, free subject has emerged from a measurement and division of the world (scaling) – particularly with the possibility of accessing, manipulating, appropriating and extracting the created/realised spaces (cf. Charbonnier 2021; Yusoff 2018).

In the so-called Anthropocene, society is confronted with a “climate regime” (Latour 2017) in which the previous production of space is disrupted. In modern practices, humans have modulated themselves as standing opposite to nature, to the environment: with the hammer, one acts upon the world; with the car, one traverses throughthe world; with the aeroplane, one flies over the world; and with the drill, one punctures holes into the world. In the Anthropocene, these practices lose their grip. Human practices – and the ‘technosphere’ that has become autonomous – have become ‘environmental’. This means that the Anthropocene is not to be understood as another dramatisation of the ecological problem (cf. Clark 2015). Rather, it is a fundamental questioning of the inherited self-world relation (cf. Horn 2014, 2017) and the associated production of space. The Anthropocene is a “Quake in Being” (Morton 2013) – a questioning of the modern placement of existence, a questioning of Holocene measurements of places, spaces, positions and landscapes. For the future constitution of society we must not only consider an “ecology without nature” (Morton 2016), but also answer the question of how human societies can continue to exist on an evidently increasingly de-scaled, spatially unstable planet (cf. Bubandt et al. 2017), given that the permanent acceleration of scaling practices is causing a breakdown of linear scaling

Former efforts to answer the question “Where am I?” lose their orienting value. Political subjectivation can no longer be guided by a pointing-mediating practice in which students learn aboutthe world (cf. Friedrichs 2022). Political becoming and political subjectivation can no longer be understood as positioning in a containerlike given world. Of crucial significance is a “doing difference” between the “being of politics” and the “becoming of the political” (Friedrichs 2021). Through which everyday action routines, through which materialities, through which arrangements does society continually assert itself “in-form” and “in-sense” (Lefort 1999). To put it more simply: How are positions, perspectives, connections and oppositions with their spaces, places and landscapes enabled and governed? How do we do “worlding” (Haraway 2018)? Or here, how are landscapes modulated through practices, materials and arrangements?

In the 21st century, amidst the emergence of a “new cosmology”, it is important to discover new forms of addressing theworld and the environment (behind the old conceptions of world and environment), in order to achieve a “critical proximity” (Latour 2021, p. 45) to the terrestrial. Landscapes reveal themselves as border-crossers between the dualism of “place and space” (Casey 1998, 2017), navigating the zone between the specifically singular “placemaking” (Page 2020) and the socially hegemonic production of spatiality (cf. Lefebvre 1991). They undermine the distinction between an inherited local and a constructed global. They demonstrate that communalities and common senses are not mere backdrops, but landscapes, the outcome of communities becoming entangled with their places and surroundings (cf. Jullien 2018; Malpas 2011). Doing, articulating and becoming community is always also doing, articulating and becoming landscape.

What happens when artistic practice does not imitate the world or nature in the modern way, but invites us to make them graspable in a different way? What happens when it attempts to promote “environmental thinking” (Hörl 2016) in an immersive format? How can we approach landscapes without simultaneously creating distance? How can we share the world with both human and non-human actors? How can we develop new modes of relationship (cf. Adamczak 2017; Haraway 1995, 2018)? How can we escape the modern view from nowhere, the modern viewpoints from which landscapes looks like panoramas?

The fundamental idea of this Shared Landscapes project is to make the world audible. These landscapes are intertwined, interfering, folded and knotted living spaces for a forthcoming time in which precisely such interferences and foldings will be crucial (cf. Barad 2013, 2015; Haraway 1995).

Shared Landscapes invites people not only to leave conventional theatre spaces, but also the city, in order to transcend zones of existence – both between city and countryside and between nature and art. Trips to the countryside are usually undertaken by families, couples, or groups of friends. One remains within a small circle. Shared Landscapes aims to decentralise the utopian and concentrated force, the gathering, as we know it from the theatre audience, the community-building collective of living art, out into the countryside. This does not involve the transformation of landscapes through architectural interventions and it is certainly not a massive technical invasion. Rather, it entails paying attention to the encountered hybrid form of nature and civilization, in the form of time. “Critical zones” (Latour/Weibel 2020) are to be articulated. The artistic exploration within the framework of Shared Landscapes invites people to enter a landscape, to touch it, to position themselves within it, through their own practices and those designed by artists. Shared Landscapes is an invitation to the art of entanglement: Becoming terra-subjectivities.

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