texts

patagoniaOtra

landscape and culture

landscape and economy

landscape and history

landscape natural +artificial

landscape and territory

an approximation from creative construction. It is the multisensoriality of landscape that we want to explore together with persons that are involved in the production of an art that takes natural space and territory as its object of representation or its place of intervention: plastic arts, music, photography, film-making, literature and, as one of them, architecture. These disciplines can contribute points of view that often are revealing. The intention of the encounter is that from within their production they offer ways of viewing and showing landscape, sharing their experiences and strategies for capturing it. They can emphasize the possibilities of creating an imagination and propose visions of the expressive potential of the landscape we are occupied with.

land use, tourism, agronomy, production and environment. A way of understanding territorial planning accepts that it is not only the distribution of physical-economical resources and the functional ordering of urban space and time, but also that of structuring and constructing the image and meaning of its territory. The construction of that image - without any doubt a cultural construction - defines the process of appropriation and use of territory through its inhabitants. Besides, landscape can be an instrument to discover and actualize potentials that are not developed, for example, applying it practically: to identify and establish images that operate and increase the tourism to a determined place. For various reasons landscape and territory can suffer grave distortions in particular circumstances, like those typical for developed touristic areas or those with potential to be developed, when a demand for socio-economic growth coincides with the existence of historical or natural sights. But at the same time tourism can become a motor for preservation. It is a necessity to harmonize the ensuing conflicts when intervening in zones of that kind.

accounts of territory and settlement. The second half of the nineteenth century meant for a huge part of Argentina a profound transformation in its social and productive structure. Patagonia formed part of that process, in so far as production was introduced into its territory. As a consequence arose the mutation of its space, into new scenery that gradually incorporated into its landscape the traits of cultivated ground, of stock breeding and of the extraction of minerals. These changes modified the configuration of the territory and its features, thereby starting a process of change that has not come to an end yet. Two phenomena coincided and can be recognized as reasons for this metamorphosis: the influx of European settlers and, as a result, the establishing and development of agricultural colonies (especially exploiting sheep breeding), and in second place, the introduction of the machines of modernization, like railway and agricultural machinery. How did the original inhabitants of the region - the Tehuelche Indians - perceive the landscape, and how did the newly arrived settlers see it, foreigners transplanted and strangers not only by culture and language - many of them came from Wales - , but also by a different geography?

a definition of landscape. A way of understanding territorial planning accepts that it is not only the distribution of physical-economical resources and the functional ordering of urban space and time, but also that of structuring and constructing the image and meaning of its territory. The construction of that image - without any doubt a cultural construction - defines the process of appropriation and use of territory through its inhabitants. Besides, landscape can be an instrument to discover and actualize potentials that are not developed, for example, applying it practically: to identify and establish images that operate and increase the tourism to a determined place. For various reasons landscape and territory can suffer grave distortions in particular circumstances, like those typical for developed touristic areas or those with potential to be developed, when a demand for socio-economic growth coincides with the existence of historical or natural sights. But at the same time tourism can become a motor for preservation. It is a necessity to harmonize the ensuing conflicts when intervening in zones of that kind..

geography, geology, biology. The forms of nature compose a complex geometrical system. The rules of geometry that structure landscape are obviously contained in the same forms of nature, although a proper aesthetic dimension of an art of the ground has to poach and acquire them, in the same way that it has to be able to capture its essence. And just like the rule of abstraction, in western civilization, obliges to operations and manipulations negotiating to a maximum the possibilities of this material, in the construction of these landscapes we will have to "force" operations and moves that rely on a universe of geometrics that speaks the same language as the ground, a language of essence.