I'm re-reading an essay by Joan Nogué that has become integral to an argument in the first chapter of my dissertation. Nogué examines what he calls "a phenomenology of landscape" in a case study of human experiences in Garrotxa (Catalonia). His essay explores the different approaches to a given terrain through interviews with farmers and painters. These two vocations tend to edit out nonproductive elements in the geography. While a farmer's experience is more corporeal, the painter's reflections seem more "holistic". It's also interesting when he discusses what painters include and exclude in their vision of the "whole" landscape. Among the things excluded: agricultural buildings, areas of deforestation, television antennas and plastic and metal structures. These exclusions do not only happen spatially but also temporally (as they edit out evidence of so-called economic improvement). So they are kind of like painterly jump cuts.
At the same time one painter reflects on painting in Garrotxa (which in Catalan means difficult or entangled terrain): "The sky is difficult to paint because it is not a smooth or uniform layer. The sky is living, filled with shades colors and vibrations."
I'm interested in asking what these exclusions mean as a point of contact between ecology and art (or a lack of contact). What do these edits imply for the nonhuman and nonliving elements out there in an apparently desecrated agricultural space?
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