In post-industrial Europe, a political and cultural debate over landscape had developed by the eighties, prompted by agents with interests as diverging as those of the environmental movement at one end, and the artists and theorists of Land Art at the other. The crisis that put an end to that decade changed the political agenda, leaving the debate unresolved; but the consciousness of an altered landscape had emerged, as well as the possibility to actively participate in its transformation as a cultural object.

At present, an equally diverse set of factors urge us to adopt an innovative strategy to make sense of altered landscapes (whether they are rural, urban, industrial or post-industrial landscapes), which in the current economic cycle are undergoing one of the biggest transformations in its history.

The current triple crisis forces us to rethink our relationship with production. The environmental crisis enforces the introduction of new elements into everyday landscape: energy producing devices using renewable sources, proximity production in order to reduce the ecological footprint of transport, renovation and integration of water processing protocols and wastewater treatment. The looming oil crisis also affects the increasing presence of renewable energy in the landscape and the transformation of the criteria for transport. The global financial crisis and the synchronous bursting of several real estate bubbles results in a large number of broken processes of transformation of the inhabited territory.

These factors define a significant change in environmental, political and economic agendas, but it is important to add that we detected equally important changes in the sociocultural agenda, intimately related to the former. In Society in general, and also among the various branches of the creative professions, there is a growing commitment towards a culture of sustainability.

Productive Landscapes, proposes a theory of landscape undoing the separation between “pragmatic and poetic”.

Alain Roger (Court traité du paysage 1997) coined the expressions artialisation in visu and artialisation in situ to describe the mechanism behind the construction of the idea of landscape as we understand it today. In the first stage, Art offers a reading of the territory, creating a cultural construction and an ideal to pursue. In a second stage, the cultural construction subsequently guides interventions on the territory itself. This is in line with the philosophical position of anti-mimesis: Life imitates art far more that art imitates life (O. Wilde, The decay of Lying, 1889)

The challenge of sustainability begins with, in a first stage, carefully listening to natural cycles. If we then want such strive to become a driving force in architectural culture we need to offer a substantial enough reading of this territory to redefine our collective imaginary.

In this workshop we shall:

• identify ready-made in visu artealizations of productive urban landscapes, that is, art pieces that can transform our understanding of sustainable production in the urban landscape.
• study the evolution of such existing artealizations, assessing their capacity for cultural transformation. That is, what media coverage they had and to what extent were they able to achieve a transformation of the public vision of their subject.
• produce further examples of in visu artealizations that may fit the study area, our own reading of the subject.
• describe implemented cases of in situ artealization; that is, interventions on reality derived from the aesthetic and cultural apparatus constructed by the above processes,
• design our own in situ interventions, as made possible by the above process.

In all steps will produce drawings, diagrams and interpretations intended to transform the way we understand reality: a redescription (vid. Rorty 1989). This will be made available for other people to use and refer to in the future, trying to determine the necessary interventions in the corresponding network of practices (vid. Latour, 1993).

We will work in groups, where each member will be in charge of a specific role (the art historian, the artist, the architect, the communicator, the politician, etc.)

Further reading, in order of relevance:
Alain ROGER Court traité du paysage, 1997 [it. Breve trattato sul paesaggio, Selerio 2009]
Oscar WILDE The Decay of Lying, 1891 [it. La decadenza del mentire, Mimesis 2013]
Timothy MORTON Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 2007
Richard RORTY Contingency irony and solidarity, 1989 [it. Contingenza, ironia e solidarietà, Laterza, 1989]
Michel HOUELLEBECQ, La Carte et le Territoire, 2010 [it. La carta e il territorio, Bompiani 2010]