“Landscapes Shaped by Extraction: An Iconographic Study of Territories in the Global South: The Case of Latin America”

This lecture is scheduled as part of the third day of the seminar “Material and Visual Culture,” organized by Laurent Châtel (UDL, CECILLE) and Hervé Brunon (CNRS, André-Chastel Center).

What, then, can we expect from the environmental shift that we are beginning to see take shape—as exemplified, for instance, by Grégory Quenet’s work on Versailles or Mark Laird’s work on gardens in England? 

We propose introducing the concept of environmental awareness—as both an epistemic and an affective stance—that relates to ecological ideas of the environment, habitat, biodiversity, and living things. One of the benefits of thinking about gardens and landscape through the lens of environmental attention is to move beyond the fear of an “end of the landscape”—to borrow Bernard Charbonneau’s 1972 words—or a “death of the landscape ”—to echo the questions raised by François Dagognet et al. In 1982—in order to reintroduce a principle of hope by making the landscape a full-fledged agent, if not of the ecological transition, then at least of our sustainability.