Theoretical proposal for the 1st Biennial of Art, Architecture and Landscape of the Canary Islands
The proposal considers the development of a landscaping project in the island of Gran Canaria, freely choosing location and approach.
The idea emerges from the understanding of the landscape as something that is not permanent and, thereby, neither fossilized nor eternal. Our interest lies in the phenomenological and variable condition of the landscape, rather than in aspects such as stability and immobility. This initial consideration permits establishing an active relationship with the physical context that starts with ourselves, modifying our corporal and sensory experience, and intensifying the subject-landscape relationship at every moment.
Five different locations of the island – the airport, the beach, the mountains, the sea and the settlements – provide the sites for a series of interventions. In each place a specific characteristic determines the approach: wind, urban fragmentations, tides, etc. In each case there are two answers: a more poetic one that obeys to the different configurations that the clouds acquire (as
atmospheric paradigm), and a more informative one thanks to a data collector of the place.
A series of artefacts are tendered as “landscape translators”, able to interpret the place and make it visible through variability, understood as a continuous and changing register that unveils and translates it into different atmospheres: from the invisible quality of the beach landscape to the gaseous atmosphere of the mountain landscape.
The landscape translators register, all in all, that which is susceptible of being altered. Transformed into detectors and climate lighthouses, they measure flows and currents. They are catchers of the invisible features that determine each place. They are built with sensitive skins that vibrate and move in accordance with the direction, intensity and speed of the atmospheric agents. Time here is an ally of the project. The translators work in real time. They permit a purely personal and immediate perception, understanding time in Merleau-Ponty’s terms as “the addition of multiple moments”.
I Bienal de Arte, Arquitectura y Paisaje en Gran Canaria. Localización: Isla de Gran Canaria. Año: 2007. Promotor: I Bienal de Arte, Arquitectura y Paisaje. Arquitecto: Á.Verdasco. Fotografías: P.García Arranz.