The ways we have of representing the landscape and the personal experience it brings us are, essentially, a reflection of ourselves which eventually becomes a map drawn by our internal topography.

In the exercise of looking at the reality which surrounds us – and the landscape is a part of this, a set of elements which interrelate and create a frame, a limit, sometimes precise, sometimes diffused – we realise that in the process of looking and all the events which start from this (thoughts, attitudes, actions…) all the structure which shapes us (cultural, social, psychological, physical…) becomes obvious. And so, the link which is established between ourselves and the landscape we see leads us to a new construction of it.

And this construction does not refer to an artistic creation or representation but rather to a vision which emerges from our own structure of thought.

The way in which we conceive landscape also conditions how we confront it when the time comes to modify it. We could say that the first conscious modifications took place at the moment when man went from being a gatherer to being a farmer. This was a geographical modification of space. This change could even have been earlier, when this primitive man decided to cut a branch to make a cover from the rain, thereby creating an architectural modification of space.

It is probable that these two changes took place together, in a space of time we could call contemporary but not simultaneous, as a change must surely have taken place inside primitive man which enabled him to think of himself not only as another part in all his system, but also as a part which could reconvert certain elements of this ecosystem for his own use, by changing and modifying space.

This change of mentality produced a radical and profound change of the entire social, mental and sacred structure of man at the same time as it completely changed the face of the planet.

The discourses on our relation with nature raise the question as to whether we consider ourselves as one more part of a whole system or, on the contrary, that man does not belong to it and therefore is a different element. In a general way, these are two positions which define our role in nature.

If so-called primitive man considered himself the usufructuary of a territory, of a nature which surrounded him, of which he formed part and which offered him its fruits to feed himself in this specific context, it is logical that the sacred concept towards nature that is typical of ancestral civilisations should appear. We see then that the relation between what is sacred is still a relation of gratitude and interchange as well as fear in the face of what is larger and unknown. However, there is an identification between man and nature. And so any intervention that has a positive or negative effect on it, will directly affect man for he is part of it. All the ritual offerings to mother nature are therefore understandable.

We find ourselves then in a situation of equilibrium in which man and nature form a unity and this balance begins to be upset when human beings realise that they can intervene in this process and modify it – cultivate – the territory. This leads to the fact that man considers he has rights over the land he works, rights which result in a sense of ownership.

The bond of ownership does not become a situation of respect or equality, but just the opposite. It places us on another level with respect to what is owned; we are not an integral part of it now, man and nature have divided.

Was this change the beginning of a catastrophe or was it the beginning of an unbridled evolution-revolution towards a better world? Where is the boundary/limit of these modifications, of this evolution: historical, moral, of survival, spatial, technical, scientific…?

These are only a few of the questions that emerge when we think about landscape and the role played by man in its constant modelling. The work of the artists in this exhibition goes beyond this. All of them transgress not the concept of landscape, but rather landscape itself through the creation of hybrid landscapes which dilute the limits between what is natural and what is artificial. But at the same time, they cause us to reflect on what can be considered natural and what artificial. Does there really exist today (or has there ever existed) in a strict sense what is natural? Can a family of peas genetically modified according to the Mendelian method be considered artificial? Is it when it enters a laboratory that it is artificial? As always there are more questions than answers.

What relation becomes established between man and nature? And what happens when this relation is mediated by technology and/or science? There is no doubt that science is a structure of thought and a cultural construction. As Dora Fried Schnitman says, another social womb, however much we want to understand it, even today, as an objective vehicle, external to what is personal and human, external to what is subjective, in fact.

From the time of antiquity until the Middle Ages there was a conception of knowledge, of knowledge understood as a unity, even though categorised. These categories were not unconnected among themselves. There was only an opposition between knowledge and the absence of knowledge or ignorance, between light and darkness, but thought was a real continuum.

This unitary conception began to crack in the seventeenth century, called the century of science, when knowledge became specialised and the connection between the different branches gradually became lost. This process culminated in the twentieth century, in what C.P. Snow called the “two cultures”: humanistic and scientific.

Thus, there appeared the two great approaches to reality which have developed side by side until the present time. It is evident that reality itself has constantly cast doubt on this division, posing serious philosophical problems to scientists but, at the same time, contributing methodological layouts to philosophers.

This division would also condition our approach to nature. We could place ourselves before the landscape in a romantic, sentimental, poetic, subjective, passionate way… or instead in a scientific, cold, objective, measured, methodological manner… There were no intermediate options, there were no greys, as one position automatically invalidated the other. And so, the scientific approach will annul the poetic vision of the landscape and the poetic vision the scientific.

It is not until the two cultures enter in crisis, independently and precisely because of this desire for independence and division, that what Snow himself will call some years later the Third Culture starts to be noticeable. This is a culture that has emerged from the union, or the meeting between the humanistic and the scientific. While romantics died of feelings, a few centuries later scientists died of sentimental inanition, asepsis and both of them from disconnection with reality. Each of the two cultures had to assert and carry through their positions – the one claiming in its moment art for art and the other claiming science for science – to finish by realising that what they said had no meaning if they excluded the other.

It was at this time when romantics had to look at the world from a little more distance and scientists had to come out of their laboratories to breathe fresh air. And it is at this point that they met and established dialogues which brought them together by making them realise that their positions were not mutually exclusive, but complementary.

It was during the second half of the last century, especially the last decades, when the “two cultures” began to walk side by side. We will see how the creative potential of the world of art is increasingly claimed by the world of science, but also how methods, planning and scientific technologies are acquired by the world of art.

It is at this point that poetic reason and scientific reason come together and widen their respective and mutual horizons in order to advance and open an infinite range of possibilities which both will profit from.

This entire process is not without a certain tension between the elements that make it up – man-nature, nature-technology, art-science… – and which become the ideal field of cultivation for new plans, new paradigms to emerge from, which will shape the process of construction of the present reality.

We realise, therefore, how the new techno-scienific tools help us to observe, understand and go deeper into nature and landscape, in order to explain what we can call the metalandscape that there is behind what we can see. They enable us to see the hidden connections that are built up from the relations and interconnections among the elements that make up this landscape.

It is in this context that the poetics of landscape emerges, the hidden poetics that is only visible thanks to the tools and methods of science and technology and which these artists use to emphasise it or intervene in it. They do not change the landscape but instead they go further than that and, by using these tools and methods, change this hidden structure, creating new connections which make it more evident. They transgress landscape, modifying its essence.

By means of different documentation (photographs, videos…) they present the recording of processes of work and at the same time of nature, in which we observe how the ones intervene in the others provoking the emergence of new spaces and new relations.