| Projektbeschreibung | How do cultural narratives inscribe, alter, or mediate our relationship with the natural world? How do constructions of scenery and nature across literature, art, or theatre shape our understanding of different landscapes, both real and imagined? How do we come to know and create the terrains we experience, live on and live through? And how do changing dynamics – whether over time, in different modes of expression, or through human intervention – modify our engagement with urban, rural, oceanic, littoral, or mountainous environments? Considering landscapes as more than mere backdrops within creative and cultural practices reveals a long history of describing, idealising, and challenging human relationships with the environment. Ranging from ancient myth to contemporary fiction, the discourses of the scientific and biological, through to the practice of landscape painting, natural settings serve as sites of negotiation, crisis, and transformation. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth recognises “man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature”. Further, English writer, broadcaster, and naturalist David Attenborough suggests that the natural world represents “the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest”. Yet, he also acknowledges urgent ecological realities: “The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it”. Ecological, infrastructural, and technological shifts are constantly reshaping the ways in which we perceive and engage with the world around us. This conference interrogates the evolving functions of landscape representations, and through interdisciplinary dialogues, aims to reflect on diverse notions of space and place, and the stakes of interpreting landscapes across media and genres. |
