Maria Hellström Reimer

Unsettling eco-scapes: aesthetic performances for sustainable futures

While the current climate crisis tightens its stranglehold on contemporary society, many are those who put their faith in groundbreaking design and artistic innovation. As a side effect of the climate threat, this renewed celebration of creative agency may be welcome, not the least from a landscape architecture perspective since, in the context of sustainable development, every design action is also a landscaping gesture with environmental implications. Nevertheless, isolated from a broader societal context, these new eco-scapes risk ending up as nothing but attractive emerald patches disguising a sprawling global ‘junkspace’. As an expanded field of aesthetic and political agency, however, the emerging sustainability culture offers new perspectives on creative spatial practice. Approaching the environmental issue from the perspective of contemporary landscape related art practices, this article seeks to contribute to the articulation of a landscape aesthetics that would meet the requirements of our agitated time. Such articulation, however, requires a reconsideration of landscape aesthetics beyond the consoling and beautiful, as well as a fundamental shift in landscape thinking from representation to agency. The future eco-scape is not necessarily a sphere where you feel ‘at ease’, but a performative and unsettled space in constant transformation and change.

Whose goodness? Ethics and aesthetics in landscapes of dissensus

Is there a logical relationship between ethics and aesthetics? Or perhaps even a natural link between practical reasoning, ‘common sense’ and the sphere of sensuous judgement? Propelled by an increasing environmental engagement and landscape awareness, these and similar philosophical questions again incur interest, motivating commentators to talk about ‘an ethical turn’. However, it is a ‘turn’ that gives rise to supplementary questions concerning the role of aesthetics and the conditions for creativity, contestation and change. Revisiting earlier ethico-aesthetic turns and twists, from modernist anti-aesthetics to contemporary neoand onto-aesthetics, the essay aims to historicize the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, including the effect on landscape in these polemics. Ultimately, the ethico-aesthetic conjuncture constitutes the structural paradox of a ‘modernity’, which simultaneously expands horizontally and elevates vertically, consensually interlocking assumptions of commonality, subjectivity and reality. The critical alternative, it is argued, is to consider the aesthetic as a political site, where the distribution of the sensuous is a dissensual matter of (landscape) concern.

Nextland : Contemporary Landscape Architecture in Austria

The apprehension of any field of practice requires overview, today more than ever. Inundated with information, we are obliged to constantly browse, search, or roam, relentlessly seeking out pattern ...As design theorist Clive Dilnot has pointed out (Dilnot 2009: 377), the stated ‘ethos’ of the survey_as well as within the increasingly diversified design field_is to provide an inventory, to register what and how, where and when, and to pedagogically make sense of a vast expanse of multifarious practices. As a systematic practice of collecting facts, the survey situates and captures relations; it enables identification of successive orders or traditions; it also allows for recognition of characteristics and clusters; and, it permits the tracing of processes, both backwards and forward. Perhaps, this latter aspect is the most decisive_ the fact that, as the careful assembling of a data set, the survey does not simply provide a record or blueprint of a situation, but constitutes itself a mapping practice, which ‘allows a trajectory to be formed in the mind, and that historical trajectory is (or so we assume) the basis of beginning to know in relation to a field’ (Dilnot 2009: 377).

Playing the Green Card – The Commodifying Fiction of a Derivative Jardin-Forêt

Abstract With the point of departure in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) – site François Mitterand (Dominique Perrault, 1989–95) and more specifically its central but inaccessible jardin-forêt, this essay problematizes what has been described as the neoliberal shift in architecture and urbanism. The BnF and its garden-forest has been interpreted as a last breath of modernist urbanism and welfare ideas. Yet, rather than dismissing this Grand opération as a tardy spasm of modernism, it is perhaps more productive to consider the ensemble an exponent of the derivative, or spin-off, spatial logic currently sustaining the fiction of urban fertility and growth.

Mobility extra situ – The Cosmopolitical Aesthetics of Tania Ruiz Gutierrez’ Elsewhere/Annorstädes/Ailleurs

Abstract In discussing a major public video installation, Elsewhere/Annorstädes/Ailleurs by Tania Ruiz Gutierrez, the present article seeks to address what is referred to here as ‘mobility ex situ’ – the unsettling aspects of a mobility culture that is both ubiquitous and at the same time exorbitant, never simply ‘in place’. Commissioned for one of the stations along the Øresund Link between Denmark and Sweden, this world-embracing cinematic montage is an integrated part of an expansive connectivity infrastructure. Yet, while providing site-specific motion captures of a translocational world, the work not only actualises a radically transformed sense of presence. Randomised and disjointed, the flow of imagery also draws attention to the territorial incoherencies and asymmetries of a mobility culture, which, despite increased site sensitivity, does not manage to shake off its constitutive ‘elsewheres’. The artwork thus provides an opportunity to unfold the ‘mobility script’ from an aesthetic – but also political – point of view, and this in three consecutive steps: the first, an introductory presentation of the art work as situational stammering; the second, a critical reflection through the work on nomadic or dispersed geographies; and the third, a discussion of the work as an expression of a cosmopolitical aesthetics.In discussing a major public video installation, Elsewhere/Annorstades/Ailleurs by Tania Ruiz Gutierrez, the present article seeks to address what is referred to here as ‘mobility ex situ ’ -- the unsettling aspects of a mobility culture that is both ubiquitous and at the same time exorbitant, never simply ‘in place’. Commissioned for one of the stations along the Oresund Link between Denmark and Sweden, this world-embracing cinematic montage is an integrated part of an expansive connectivity infrastructure. Yet, while providing site-specific motion captures of a translocational world, the work not only actualises a radically transformed sense of presence. Randomised and disjointed, the flow of imagery also draws attention to the territorial incoherencies and asymmetries of a mobility culture, which, despite increased site sensitivity, does not manage to shake off its constitutive ‘elsewheres’. The artwork thus provides an opportunity to unfold the ‘mobility script’ from an aesthetic -- but also political -- point of view, and this in three consecutive steps: the first, an introductory presentation of the art work as situational stammering; the second, a critical reflection through the work on nomadic or dispersed geographies; and the third, a discussion of the work as an expression of a cosmopolitical aesthetics.