Unfamiliar Territory

Abstract

The project deals with ways in which understandings of landscape reading, specificity, landscape intervention and landscape experience become reconfigured once looking at landscape as a complex and metastable system and at a landscape intervention not as a complete or final thing but as a constant action. It could be seen as an attempt at putting forward renewed understanding of landscape design that wouldn’t abolish its centuries long tradition of ‘image-making’ but would seriously question and necessarily redefine the taken-for-granted stability of such landscape images and instead on mere perception focus on the aesthetic power of affect. The project places focus on what things do, how they are formed, how they could be otherwise - to examine that which precedes the division of the world into objects, places, selves, things, etc. In this way it attempts to address the question: how could landscapes actively meet concerns of our social reality today? More specifically, the project deals with disturbed sites and a specific site of interest - Fort de Vaujours, an abandoned nuclear area near Paris. The basis of the project is the theoretical research on disturbed sites through the examination of the concept of territory and ‘the unfamiliar’ which focuses on territorology, a general science of territory as developed by Andrea Mubi Brighenti.