We know that landscape, understood as humanized nature, was first recorded by the early travelling photographers, whose aim was to show the world remote, unexplored, beautiful and curious places; in this way, little by little, nature came to belong to us. The domestication of nature gave rise to the notion of landscape, replacing nature itself in its relationship with social events. The man–nature pairing shifted towards man–landscape: the conquest of nature, at once achieved and wounded, led in part to our forgetting of that which sustains us.
On the other hand, if we understand resistance as forms of opposition to external strategies or everyday obligations, arising from an emancipatory impulse, we can construct our landscapes of resistance by incorporating into the enduring desire to return to the whole (nature) the capacity to resist. That is, to participate differently in relation to established power; to engage, through our aptitude and attitude, with everyday demands, bringing an end to old destructive representations and generating another symbolism of existence in which nature—now landscape—recovers its role.
Paisajes de resistencia
This project articulates a discourse in continuity with some of Ángel Marcos’s recent works, Rabo de lagartija and The Intimate Subversión. Here, he proposes an approach to the contemporary idea of resistance from an ecological, social, political and historical perspective.
Nature is freed from display cases that have been absolved of their former functions—preserving and exhibiting—and adapts to a new role: “to endure, to resist.” The proposal consists of photographs of landscapes abstracted from their generality: “to resist and to act.”
Paisajes de resistencia delves into landscape as a place of return and gathering for those who practice other ways of inhabiting and of inhabiting themselves. It presents landscape as nature intervened by human action, nature as both a site of reivindication and as something shaped by cultural and economic contexts. Charged with water, grass and memory, this project is a proposal to “remember and to decide.”
