Project description

The principal aim of this project is to expand and contribute to Polish reflection on landscape, for instance by integrating approaches developed in various fields of science which address the issue in their investigations. Landscape represents a phenomenon which is complex, involves numerous aspects and eludes straightforward paradigms and clear-cut definitions. This is more than expressly evinced by the fact that it is an object of study and interest in many disciplines, such as aesthetics, history of art, history, cultural studies, geography, anthropology, archaeology, landscape design and urban planning. In the recent years, it has also been a topic of public debate, which means that landscape acquires increasing social significance as a matter of widespread concern. This is also how it is defined in the European Landscape Convention (2000). The attempts made to date to encapsulate landscape (through the notions of aesthetics, geography, architecture and indirectly in the ‘landscape law act’) as well as the ensuing studies push its inherent ambiguity and vagueness to the margins, tailoring the term down to one’s viewpoints and needs. However, landscape is a ‘wandering notion’ (M. Bal), as its very history demonstrates. It is that aspect we would like to make the object our deliberations, as we are convinced that landscape cannot be analysed if its diverse meanings and significations, from artistic through geographical to metaphorical ones are not taken into account.

The domain which may be able to accomplish the task and at the same time subsume all standpoints are culturally oriented landscape studies, a discipline we wish to develop and foster. In our opinion, the singularity of landscape is evident in its absolutely fundamental duality manifested in the aesthetic and cultural dimension: a landscape is simultaneously a fragment of reality and a manner in which the reality appears to us. The duality is also revealed in aesthetic, axiological and existential experience. Consequently, we find that landscape is an entity of definitely cultural nature, and thus its identity and specificity should be interpreted.

When one acknowledges the cultural nature of landscape, the focus then shifts to the social while retaining the artistic, the natural or the sensory component. Consequently, we highlight that a landscape cannot be conceived and thought outside culture, while its material aspect is not overlooked either.

The cultural dimension of landscape is itself twofold (which derives from its immanent duality): on the one hand it is a reality experienced via categories provided by culture, and on the other it is nature transformed by culture. Therefore, in our approach culture is perceived a as a dynamic factor which yields or transforms landscape in the course of historical processes, thanks to which one can distinguish (though not separate) between a landscape construed as a reality experienced by virtue of cultural categories and a landscape as a fragment of reality which has been transformed by culture. This is accompanied by a presumption that culturally transformed landscapes possess the same value as natural ones. At the same time, we recognize that landscape disposes of a causative agency both with respect to shaping cultural tradition and individual sensory perception of the world.

A landscape researcher who appreciates visual nature and aesthetic assets of landscape, and who notices the human factor in how it is shaped and understood, faces a quandary which in fact relates to the very fundamentals of landscape. If we assert for instance that landscape means a topographic, diversified, and measurable geographical and natural space, then this space finds its pictorial representation mediated by art. However, if we assume, as cultural geographers do, that landscape does not consist merely of views and sights, but encompasses everything that surrounds us, the environment and the space in which we are active, the place and the ancestral land where our roots are, then its source is not in an image but in a ‘country’. Consequently, landscape becomes a living space, a surrounding shaped in the course of everyday, routine actions and experiences. We are convinced that acknowledging the inalienable duality of landscape (highlighted e.g. by Stanisław Pietraszka) in an aesthetic and cultural dimension is an effective solution of the dilemma.

To landscape researcher Denis Cosgrove, geographer, landscape was a way of understanding the world. To us, it is a way in which the world is experienced. Experience transcends the aforementioned dichotomy, by virtue of which none of the senses of landscape is deprived of its value. The duality is in fact observed and satisfied: on the one hand the world is experienced as a landscape, which hitherto entailed a distanced and superficial perception (from the outside), yet on the other it is a kind of experience which is crucial for the moulding of identity and a sense of belonging (a look from the inside). Such experience is expressed in what is existential and in what is sensory; as a result, landscape can be approached as a space where a life is lived, where actions are taken and where things are felt. To us, landscape thus becomes clearly associated with a place and with surroundings: landscape is an environment saturated with significations.

The notion of landscape as a visual experience, geographical understanding of cultural landscape as a space transformed by the human, historical approaches in which landscape is a source of identity all have a chance of being considered as a composite, if one adopts the category of landscape as a multi-layered experience, where the experience is both subjective and social.

The intention behind our project is to effect a ‘humanistic shift’ in the studies of landscape and a ‘landscape shift’ in cultural research, so as to demonstrate that landscape functions as a source engendering the fundamental relationships between the human and the world, evinced in the manner in which the human relates to the world and experiences the latter. We are going to search for in-depth and insightful answers to the vital questions in this respect: What is landscape? What makes it distinct among other cultural phenomena? How do we experience landscape and what is the impact of the experience on us?

A reconceptualization of landscape, while recognizing that the research scope needs to be made more comprehensive, will transform cultural studies of landscape into a trans-discipline, an intermediary bridging those fields in which landscape has traditionally been an object of interest and investigation. This requires developing a domain of research which combines the concepts and ideas formulated by other disciplines: science and art, humanities, social and natural sciences. However, the discourse of memory or cultural heritage, ecology and environmental protection need to be present there as well. Thus one of the foremost aims is to devise a common platform for discourse. It is our ambition to make the issue of landscape one of the objects of research within Polish humanities, and to couple theoretical approaches with opportunities of application with respect to Polish cultural landscape. This is a vital matter, considering the ongoing, violent changes in the indigenous landscape due to civilizational development, which still call for a profound consideration.

We are a group of researchers who represent different scientific backgrounds but share common research interests. Together, we are carrying out the project entitled Cultural Landscape Studies (project no. 0059/NPRH4/H2b/83/2016) financed by the Minister of Science and Higher Education as part of the National Programme for the Development of Humanities. The project is scheduled to complete in 2019.

The team are:

dr hab. Beata Frydryczak, Associate Professor, AMU Institute of European Culture in Gniezno

dr Mateusz Salwa, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw,

dr Magdalena Gimbut, Institute of Polish Culture and Language, Zhejiang University, Ningbo Institute of Technology, China

mgr Monika Stobiecka, doctoral student,

mgr Maciej Kędzierski, doctoral student,