Benetton Foundation launches 17th edition of Landscape Days on Zoom

The Benetton Studi Ricerche Foundation is organizing the 17th edition of the International Landscape Study Days, designed by the Scientific Committee, under the coordination of Luigi Latini and Simonetta Zanon, and scheduled, in an online version, on the Zoom platform, with simultaneous translation in Italian and English, in the afternoons of Thursday, February 18, Friday 19, Thursday 25 and Friday 26, starting at 5 pm. The days, which will see the participation of leading experts from different disciplines, will have a coda with other appointments in the following months, continuing the reflection on the theme of landscape, in its different declinations, as one of the constants of the research and dissemination activities of Fondazione Benetton studi Ricerche.

This year’s meetings focus on the theme of the body-landscape relationship in the Anthropocene, meaning by body the active presence that is the inescapable subject of a world that is transformed and revealed thanks to our physicality, and meaning by landscape, every environment and every place, down to the walls of the house itself, which are often our current, prevailing horizon. The four days will be divided into sessions, according to a scheme that is not intended to separate domains and contexts that by their nature live intertwined, but to evoke, by key words, some possible directions to be explored through what also seem to be inescapable coordinates around which our presence in places is organized.

On Thursday, Feb. 18, at 5 p.m., the first of four days is focused “in the imaginary,” with talks by Marc Treib, professor emeritus of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley; Massimo Bartolini, artist and Matteo Frittelli, filmmaker; and Nicolas Vamvouklis, curator. The session is preceded by an introduction by Luigi Latini and Simonetta Zanon, curators of the days, and a screening of Marco Zuin’s short film, Bodies, Landscapes, made for this occasion on the theme of the study days. Poetry and healthy realism in the vision of Marc Treib, who, after noting how “All the senses find stimuli in the landscape: the sound of the wind through the grass or on the water, the fragrance of flowers or decaying leaves, the feel of the bark, smooth or rough, of the tree, and even the taste, though probably through the nose more than through the mouth,” notes that “burial in the cemetery demonstrates the definitive and lasting link between the body and the landscape.” Nicolas Vamvouklis, contemporary art curator and director of K-Gold Temporary Gallery, Greece, will reflect on Performative Landscapes. Presence and the corporeal in contemporary art practices. The paper investigates the intimate relationship between performance art and landscape by looking at major artworks by Ana Mendieta, Joan Jonas, Zhang Huan and Julius von Bismarck. Four artists who place their own bodies at the center of their research as a laboratory for the production of new knowledge and shared experience On the theme, Massimo Bartolini, a concept artist from Tuscany, will also bring his original experience and vision to the topic, who will talk about his Black Circle Square, a work inspired by the painting Black Circle by the Russian-Ukrainian artist Kazimir Malevič (1878-1935), created for Emscherkunst 2016, using the water tank of the Fire Department on the border between Dortmund and Castrop-Rauxel. A black circle, coinciding with the water tank, is inscribed in a large square white platform. The composition represents a kind of garden without trees, a landscape to be regularly cleaned and cared for, in which the physical immersion that lies at the heart of the performance, and which thanks to the images of director Matteo Frittelli can be replicated indefinitely, speaks of the evolution of a place, of the active role that everyone can play and of a possible paradigm shift, toward a reconciliation with nature and the landscape of which we are a part, which is necessary and possible also thanks to the tools proper to art.

On Friday, Feb. 19, at 5 p.m., the second session, focused on the theme “in urban space, in the home,” with talks by Cristina Bianchetti, professor of urban planning at the Polytechnic University of Turin; Francesco Careri, professor at the Department of Architecture, University Roma Tre, co-founder of the urban exploration collective Stalker; and Luca Molinari, professor of Architecture Theory and Design at the Second University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, and scientific director of the M9 Museum in Mestre. It will be the latter who will analyze the theme of the body in domestic space, “seen as the sum of relationships, micro-spacialities and objects that represent us, telling of a subtle and complex relationship between us and the idea of home ... a very important unstable landscape ... a place of conflict and change that well tell of the structural crisis of our time, which the pandemic condition has exasperated ... bringing the relationship between body, disease, segregation and inhabited place into an extreme condition worth reflecting on as we look at how ’domestic landscapes’ will take shape in the years to come.” Cristina Bianchetti will shift the focus From the urbanism of places to the urbanism of bodies, highlighting how “the urbanism of bodies opens new investigations, new embodied, vibrant, relational cartographies. No longer great overviews of ensembles, as were André Corboz’s Geneva atlases or Bernardo Secchi’s soil projects or still so many landscape projects in the 1990s. The reading of the urban no longer closely follows morphology, history or institutional processes, but the way space expresses, sharpens, attenuates, makes concrete those themes that, elevated into generality, force the boundaries of the individual body.” Francesco Careri, through an account in images of actions conducted together with the Stalker collective and many others over the past twenty-five years, will address the theme Nomadic Alternatives for inhabiting cities. The underlying thesis is that “architecture is not born sedentary, it is born nomadic. And it is because of the natural movement of wandering people that in all archaic civilizations the complex systems of cultural rules that are the basis of hospitality have developed. Nomadism and hospitality have shaped our living far more than we think, and they can still help us change our lifestyles and transform our cities.”

Thursday, Feb. 25 at 5 p.m., the third session, “In the Landscape,” with Cristina Barbiani, Matteo Meschiari, Marco Mulazzani. Matteo Meschiari, anthropologist, professor of Geography at the University of Palermo, will talk about the deep roots of “landscape making” in our species and how the landscape modification intervention initiated 1.8 million years ago by Homo habilis became “landscape invention” with the arrival, 200,000 years ago, of Homo sapiens, and this due to the evolutionary survival strategy of our species. It will be Marco Mulazzani, professor of History of Architecture at the University of Ferrara, who will deepen in his talk the considerations on the burials of German soldiers between 1920 and 1970, mentioned above, calling into question the body-landscape link from an unusual point of view, the inescapable one of death in Western culture. Cristina Barbiani, scientific head of the Master Digital Exhibit at Iuav University of Venice, will focus on the human landscapes of Anna and Lawrence Halprin. Choreographer and dancer, the former, landscape architect, the latter, from their mutual influences they have drawn the urge to step “out of the comfort zone of their own discipline, and to look and move beyond it in a continuous challenge that seeks to hold together art and life, control of space and attention to the individual, psychoanalysis and political struggle, awareness of the past and attention to the present. Landscapes and gardens designed for those who pass through them, choreographies that move space and transform it, are just some of the exercises in transforming the relationship between figure and background.” The session will close with an online screening of the film Breath made visible, by Ruedi Gerber (USA, 2009, running time 100’), a feature film about the life and career of Anna Halprin.

On Friday, Feb. 26, at 5 p.m., the fourth session, “in the Garden,” with Veronique Faucheur and Marc Pouzol, landscape architects from the studio atelier le balto, Berlin; Marcello Di Paola, environmental philosopher, lecturer at the University of Palermo and Loyola University Chicago JFRC; and Monique Mosser, art and garden historian, Paris. It is by Marcello Di Paola to quote “Landscapes as Gardens: hybrids, shakes, chimeras and deserts of the Anthropocene,” the title of his paper. “Using the garden as a model,” he writes, it is “possible to distinguish four types of landscapes that will be characteristic of the Anthropocene: hybrid landscapes, as every garden is; smoothie landscapes, in which anthropogenic but more than human bio-ecological forces take over; chimera landscapes, from which ecological forces are excluded; and desert landscapes, post-human places from which anthropological forces are excluded.” Veronique Faucheur and Marc Pouzol, French landscape architects based in Berlin with the atelier le balto, will talk about their vision of garden making as one works on a choreography and of garden art as staging (or putting into space) a drawing or sketch, in which the main actors are an original plant palette and the bodies that inhabit it. Monique Mosser, an international point of reference in garden history and criticism, will conclude the days with an inspiring talk, looking at the theme of metamorphosis and the infinite combinations suggested by the binomial body-garden in history and in the present day.

The 2021 edition of the study days, as anticipated, will be held online, on the Zoom platform, with simultaneous translation in Italian and English. Participation in the days is free; registration is required through the appropriate link posted, with all useful information, including information on educational credits, on social channels and the Foundation’s website www.fbsr.it. For more information: paesaggio@fbsr.it

Image: Marc Treib, Kew Gardens (London). Women on bench (1974)

Benetton Foundation launches 17th edition of Landscape Days on Zoom

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