Opening speech at the seminar in Art Lab10, Turin
1. Landscape is not in things, it is in the gaze. With this premise, artists and poets have displaced those who, like us, have been working on the subject for some time because of its substance: as a cultural asset, as a territorial resource, as an aspect of the environmental system. From here, with difficulty but also with satisfaction, we begin to think about the landscape as a relationship, a dialectic between the territory and the point of view, between objective and subjective factors. And one discovers that even the gaze can be considered a resource, if one recognises its characteristics, its implicit demand.
A film a few years ago, Room with a View, brought attention back to an extraordinary Forster story from the early 1900s. The story is romantic: a young Englishwoman is caught in an inappropriate love affair during a trip to Italy, with the help of the Tuscan landscape, summed up in the view from the rented room in which she resides. This adventure, little more than platonic, changes her life, making her discover the power of the intensity of emotions.
Forster’s view of Florence is a dreamed landscape that constituted, in the imagination of Victorian and repressed England, a habitat of freedom and love. An idea fuelled not so much by different customs and mores regarding love or sexual relations, but by the stimulation of the Anglo-Saxon senses caused by light, the warmth of the seasons, the Mediterranean culture of the body, food, sounds and close proxemics in social relationships…. in short, a sense of the living landscape that attracts the liveliness of feelings.
The common sense of landscape therefore does not only reveal itself in a traditional way, like the German Heimat, which generates the attachments to one’s own territory that weigh on so many of our life choices, or the nostalgia that motivates so many returns. In the common sense of landscape also lies the source of the yearning to escape that grips citizens at the weekend, for the sea, the countryside or another city; lies the regard for the Touring Club books lined up on a shelf in our grandparents’ living rooms. In those books of black-and-white photos and maps, the role of the landscape as the foundation of our value system is revealed, so embodied in current 20th-century thinking that we no longer even realise it: it is the ripe fruit of the Risorgimento, of Italian citizenship, it is the concrete and unexpected form of heritage that the prodigal son rediscovers as a sign of belonging to a noble lineage.
The common sense of the landscape is not an autochthonous product for autistic consumption, as the rural world taught us to do, it is on the contrary a way of communication, a representation to oneself and to the world of one’s habitat, an exercise of global citizenship, an implicit fruit of the democratic revolutions of the 19th century. We like to know that the world is rich in variety and beauty of nature and products, and we like to be part of it not only as users but also as bearers of our own specific contribution: the landscape is not a datum, it is continually produced in the things and cultures of each of us.
Up to this point, an acknowledgement of values that constitute the quality of life of our civilisation, a psychologist’s or rather anthropologist’s work that we must bear in mind in order not to objectivise the theme too much when we speak of resources, in order not to speak only of goods, environments, and architecture, forgetting the engine within us that generates appreciation and value.
2. Now the news: if the Council of Europe ten years ago promoted a Landscape Convention, asking for commitment from the institutions of all countries to defend and enhance the identity role of the distinctive landscapes of each place, there is a reason; indeed there is a political role. We realise, in Strasbourg, that the identity of peoples does not only pass through the language and symbols of their history, but through the widespread culture of their territory, through the consideration they have for the places they inhabit. One realises that the landscape is not just a good in itself, but that it is useful for a political project, for improving the quality of life, and that action on the landscape promotes the collective capacity to make this improvement lasting and shared.
It turns out that being aware of one’s resources and offering one’s territory without consuming it is the new way to cultivate, to trigger sustainable economic cycles. It is a challenge that is extraordinarily interesting because it structurally has alternative aspects to the economic system that has deluded us for two generations and that today is seen to be going through gigantic cracks. It is first and foremost a cultural challenge, requiring the formation of skills and entrepreneurial abilities calibrated on values other than the pure preservation of objects or vice versa of pure commercial economy.
Often these are talents already present in the territory, hidden in the knowledge and micro-enterprises that grow in local milieus, born in a concept of slow economy and sobriety in the use of resources, even if crushed by a prevalence of the culture of generality and disengagement and by a corsair and short-term entrepreneurship. Hopes of innovation for a slow, sober and widespread model of behaviour and pleasures of life are entrusted to local initiatives, to testimonies still present for a few years but on the way to extinction, tenacious but weak energies if they are not put into a system to acquire visibility, credibility, and the ability to communicate between subjects committed to the same direction.
On the other hand, these initiatives find adequate development if they connect with a demand that speaks the same language, that searches with the same taste for vast space and long time, that is animated by a respectful and amused curiosity. For the time being, these are niche (tourist and residential) users, small numbers who do not move billionaire investments and who do not constitute any kind of organised front: on the contrary, the individualist search for one’s favourite places and heartland landscapes seems to be the main psychological driver of this aspect of quality of life.
The fragmentation of local initiatives and the fragmentation of the demand for a living, non-trivial landscape are simultaneously a source of weakness and resilience: they do not allow for powerful local development prospects, but they also have a greater capacity for adaptation and survival than initiatives that require major planning and investment. On the contrary, it is precisely fragmentation that prevents homologation, encourages diversification and the search for the particular, the specific that one wants to maintain and that is the object of research for landscape ‘explorers’.
On this qualitative front, which is strategic for our culture that risks definitive trivialisation, on which those who devote their energies as entrepreneurs or consumers align themselves, there is a lack of support services that do not imply a process of massification, that do not lead to a merely quantitative development, to a competition to the bottom that loses on the road first precisely the differential qualities of places and views. The role of landscape institutions is perhaps all here, in promoting the routes, maps and support services for this Operation Dunkirk of new economic behaviour based on territorial and landscape competence, in the defeat of consumerism and useless production. Among the support services, which the institutions can (at this point must) provide, support for the formation of networks, of systems of relations that can achieve critical mass and recognisability for those involved in the valorisation of landscape resources, is fundamental.
In fact, the production of typical products, the provision of services for tourism, and the restoration of cultural heritage are not in themselves activities that enhance the landscape and generate alternative economic modes, if they are not included in an overall design that meets two requirements
– participate in a holistic representation of a place, in which the individual elements contribute to defining an organic image, which is deposited in the memory as a whole;
– they generate a complex interaction in those who enjoy places, inducing them to use resources even beyond those they had anticipated: they trigger a process of serendipity that surprises and intrigues compared to normal commercial functionalism and the sad specialisation of tastes. In this sense, the role of the institutions is not to produce the landscape, but to include the work of those who produce it in a coherent and integrated system, with
– incentives to establish relations between normally incommunicating aspects (such as cultural tourism with seaside tourism, the enhancement of the territory’s historical signs with agricultural production and accommodation activities, or the conservation of natural and architectural assets with cultural activities),
– rules that reduce the scope for contradictory messages, such as the devastation of the edges of valuable areas to provide services for their production (tourist construction around protected areas, warehouses at the base of vineyard slopes that are candidates for Unesco status) or the banal construction of underused suburbs around historical centres, which are valuable but also underused,
– selective procedures to eliminate initiatives that exhaust their propulsive force in the short term, which are unmanageable due to their cost, their difficult acceptance in the common sense of the landscape, or the lack of adequate widespread expertise: to develop a technical culture of strategic project management that is currently lacking and causes us to waste energy and the few investments available.
These are issues on which the good will of many mayors and councillors and the virtuous programmes of protected areas and regions have been measured over the past few years: few successes and many disappointments, dispersions of enthusiasm and investments that never seem to reach the minimum threshold to give satisfaction to those who participate, visibility to the interventions, and convincing economic inducement.
Certainly, the few examples of success were based not so much on general strategies as on local specificities, integrations between a few initiatives between entrepreneurs of a similar level facing shared challenges. If this aspect, a common basis to be integrated, constitutes the common denominator of the few successful initiatives, certainly the entities involved in projects to enhance their territory through the logic of the landscape must characterise their directing and coordinating contribution on the basis of the specific (time) conditions and (local) situations.
Without the ability to recognise the limits and resources of time and place, it is impossible to plan with the understanding that landscape work is always like that of the Argonauts, who remade the ship as it sailed, replacing it piece by piece without ever stopping it.
One may believe that for the success of a public strategy, the specificities of the reference situations must be thoroughly considered, whose dimensions are always on a local scale but never enclosable in a single municipality.
But alongside attention to situations, one must also interpret in which cycle of one’s own history the shared landscape lies: the evolutionary conditions of the relationship between people and places must be studied. In short, there are no omnivalent recipes, each strategy must be ad hoc, adequate to optimise results in relation to that piece of territory and that evolutionary phase of the landscape.
3. In the virtuous cases already underway, local development and quality of life improvement projects have always been realistically triggered in the specific historical and cultural conditions, case by case. But while attention to places is beginning to spread, so far landscape strategies have lacked attention to the temporal dynamics, the evolving conditions of the relationship between users and places.
In order to exemplify what is meant by evolutionary landscape conditions, let us try to sketch a few types, relating to different stages of the attitude towards resources and the territory:
– the sleeping landscape, in transformation only by processes of abandonment, neglected in its maintenance and on the way to obliteration in the collective memory, even if still endowed with organic resources and with an intact material base, which awaits the appearance of vital subjects to set economic processes in motion again; it characterises the contexts of abandoned historical centres, of networks of non-emerging cultural resources, of rural strips considered to lack economic chances, with inhabitant communities reduced to a minimum and niche visitor flows;
– the shangri-là landscape, little endowed with resources of general interest, with no emergencies, hidden from flows and little communicating with neighbouring territories and with ‘outsiders’, with a stable relationship between places and inhabitants, exclusive with respect to novelties (places can also profoundly change without altering the inhabitants’ blocked behaviour); it characterises areas of plain or hillside of little significance, often touched by settlement sprawl and industrialisation processes but lacking a complete urban structure and distant from large flows;
– the conscious landscape, with a dimension and relevance of identity resources appropriate to the enlarged community, i.e. on the one hand legible and useful for the sense of personal identity of new inhabitants or visitors, at least in its symbolic references, and on the other hand capable of maintaining its own historical identity by metabolising the comparison with other cultures; it has an inclusive evolutionary rhythm, in which the cultural consideration of places and the transformation of the physical layout go hand in hand; it characterises brief happy periods in the evolution of urban landscapes, when the cultural dynamics of the inhabiting community correspond to the adaptive capacity to produce signs and behaviour balanced between identity and novelty;
– the stressed landscape, complex and contradictory, the anarchic product of overlapping intentions and processes degrading the previous heritage, constantly evolving, generating feelings of disorientation that often plague peri-urban situations or those with recent settlement development;
– the landscape to be invented, defined by absence: devoid of identity and users, produced by private uses that often degrade material resources and by transformations that are hidden and far from the collective imagination; it characterises large settlements dominated by industrial or logistical equipment, abandoned areas, residual territories among non-inclusive landscapes.
Each of these types evolves into another over longer or shorter periods, but still slowly enough to appear stable in the eyes of the inhabitants. Thus one moves in a habitat conditioned by each evolutionary phase, which constitutes the milieu in which to set one’s projects and desires.
If these local situations and time conditions are understood and taken into account, it will certainly be easier to share strategies for action with the inhabitants, to find operational alliances and entrepreneurs willing to get involved, rather than to propose programmes with reference to an abstract and timeless landscape.
Experimental strategic projects can find a place if, at the given place and stage, they recognise existing resources and initiatives that respond to a potential demand for improving the quality of life and the local economy. On this basis, of even minimal but autonomous local capacities, it is very likely to find a foothold with the institutions, which is indispensable for legitimising and promoting the growth (not the birth) of projects.
The text presented here constituted the opening track of a seminar that was dedicated to Landscape as part of Art Lab10, on 2 October 2010.
ArtLab – realised by the Fitzcaraldo Foundation and the Region of Piedmont – is a meeting place par excellence for the cultural community interested in a critical and unreserved discussion on crucial and topical issues for the management, economy and policies of Culture; a place where cultural operators, public administrators, entrepreneurs, artists and intellectuals from different generations, fields and disciplines meet to discuss the role of culture in Italy and the conditions for its sustainability.
ArtLab 10, the fifth edition, taking note of the increasingly problematic context cultural and artistic operators have to deal with, proposed a common reflection among professionals and decision makers on the present, in order to identify ideas, directions and strategies for the future for the renewal of cultural policies, the management of artistic and cultural organisations, and the relaunch of cultural entrepreneurship, beyond sector issues.
ArtLab 10 addressed, with specific seminars, topics of great interest and topicality such as: ideas and tools for sustainability, the landscape as a resource for development, social enterprise at the service of cultural production, the mobility of artists and cultural operators, and accessibility for people with disabilities to cultural offers.
The seminar Room with a View was attended by Enrica Borghi, Asilo Bianco, Ameno (NO), Fausto Carmelo Nigrelli, Mayor of Piazza Armerina (EN), Ippolito Ostellino, Management Authority of the Po River protected area of Turin, Nicola Perullo, University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo (CN), Liliana Pittarello, for the Italian Touring Club, as well as other local administrators and operators.
The contributions and the lively debate that followed brought out the extraordinary vitality and interest aroused by the topic, but also the isolation of those who try their hand at ‘resistance’ initiatives and the difficulty of giving substance and continuity to strategies that are not mere denial of transformation. The leitmotif that emerges from the direct testimonies is the loneliness of the local battles to maintain this or that specificity, and the contradiction of the authorities, caught between a constraining instrumentation, partly wanted and partly suffered, and the drive to transform, partly suffered and partly wanted. In any case, they all have a common denominator: the attitude of accepting mediocre solutions, as if the best government action was at the very least, struggling to contain the damage. The seminar’s approach to the topic seemed to open up a new window on the most widespread position: overcoming the basic scepticism of those who claim that ‘For the landscape, you know what you fear and you don’t know what you want’.
