Chiara Simonigh
University of Torino (Italy)
Landscape, Aesthetics, Complexity. A Research Hypothesis
The landscape is the sensitive expression of the sharing of time and space among human beings and other entities of nature.
From the Anthropocene, it bears the signs of the multiple ways through which man has thought and related to himself and the cosmos.
Therefore, the landscape can be considered as the evidence of the state of health or suffering of the Earth system, from the perspective of what Gregory Bateson defined through the expression “healthy ecology”.
The research hypothesis we intend to explore emerges from the understanding of the landscape aesthetic experience in the audio-visual image as a process of sensitive knowledge or comprehension, containing a largely unexpressed potential for changing, as it implies the full deployment of subjectivity.
The reason for it is that the aesthetic experience of landscape images is based on a transference between man and entities of the cosmos, in which the latter are analogically perceived as subjects and not seen as objects by detached and instrumental rationality.
The sensitive knowledge or comprehension originating from the aesthetic experience of the landscape image, in principle, but surely not automatically nor immediately, could foster a rooting and a greater diffusion of the cosmocentric paradigm, by starting from a relationship of analogy and bioanthropological reciprocity. Under this relation, the care of the Earth and its beings may be experienced not so much as obligation imposed or self-imposed, but rather as a source of sensitivity and awareness able to equate and bring together one’s self with others’ life and prosperity.
The ecological-aesthetic experience of the audio-visual image of the landscape, in fact, can lead to the transference between homo and cosmos and, through this, to a comprehension of the human as an integral part of the Earth.
Chiara Simonigh is an associate professor of Media Theories and Visual Culture at the University of Turin. Her researches relate primarily to the connection between the philosophy of complexity and aesthetics of audio-visual media, focusing on the processes of comprehension and image interpretation as well as on implications for the aesthetic ecology and social inclusion. Among her books, Il sistema audiovisivo. Estetica e complessità, Meltemi 2020 (in press); L’immagine-spettacolo, Bonanno 2011; Il cinema, il corpo e l’anima, Le Mani 2008; (with L. Termine) Lo spettacolo cinematografico. Teorie ed estetica, UTET, 2003. She edited the following works by Edgar Morin, Le cinéma, un art de la complexité (with M. Peyrière), Nouveau Monde, Paris 2018; Il cinema o l’uomo immaginario, Raffaello Cortina, 2016.