B 3.3 The interpretation of landscapes. The role of images

[TERCUD]

"Besides the diversity of sensitive and intellectual frameworks which allow one to seize the external reality and organize it mentally, landscapes may also be interpreted by comparison with imagined realities, which initiate new readings of the sensible world and give indications on the ways material setting may be transformed, improved and redrawn. The models of landscape people build in their minds differ according to cultures:
(i) In most traditional societies, people saw their environment as created and shaped by supranatural forces or beings. Landscapes were, in this way, expressions of the Cosmos, Nature or Society. The imaginary landscapes were thus built according to cosmogonic or religious models (Berque, 1995).
(ii) Augustin Berque showed that at some point in history (the fourth century A. D. in China, the fifteenth in Western Europe), a new way to perceive and imagine landscapes emerged (Berque, 1995): it relied on the aesthetic feelings that wide horizons, long perspectives, colours, shapes and movements generate in most souls. This form of imaginary landscape still shapes our perception of the environment, and many of the actions we program for it.
(iii) A third way of imagining landscapes developed also from the sixteenth and mainly seventeenth century: it was based on the idea that material flows of energy and matter are responsible for the forms of the material and living world which surrounds us. This view became systematic with the rise of evolutionism and the interpretation it provided of the processes out of which living beings develop.
(iv) With the development of psychoanalysis, new ways of conceiving the environment evolved from the end of the nineteenth century. It is perhaps in the works of Gaston Bachelard that they are best expressed (Bachelard, 1948; 1957): for him, there were deep correspondances between the forms of the environment which people inhabited and their lived experience; some places were characterized by an atmosphere of quietness and serenity which favoured meditation; others were so sheltered that they appeared as niches for the protection of individual or collective life. Built environments were similarly interpreted: cellars and granaries appeared, for many children living in traditional houses, as places to isolate and develop a feeling of security. At another scale, living on an island was often seen as an experience of seclusion, out of the main streams of continental life; nature appeared closer than in inland locations (Bonnemaison, 1990-1991).
The people who live in an area do not necessarily share the same imaginary landscapes. Rural workers still perceive in their daily environment the supranatural forces and beings responsible for the climatic hazards and calamities that threaten their crops and cattle. Middle class dwellers of the nearby towns consider landscapes as natural paintings, i. e. as a source of aesthetic feelings; many of them know, at the same time, that physical forces and chemical and biological processes explain the features they observe; during the last fifty years, a growing number of people have adhered to the ecological interpretation of landscapes. Poets are more open to the psycho-analytical images.
Denis Cosgrove has shown the pregnancy of these images: icons often have a natural authority (Cosgrove, 2006); the people who imprint on the reality the best valued forms of imaginary landscapes of a time benefit from it. In order to legitimate the power they were harnessing in the economies and societies of their country, the new ruling classes in Venice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, impressively reshaped the landscapes they controlled."

(This is an excerpt from the text by Professor Paul Claval “THE IDEA OF LANDSCAPE”)