Viewing, weaving : phenomenological spectatorship and performing landscape
Pysyvä osoite
Verkkojulkaisu
Tiivistelmä
This thesis project examines the notion of landscape as an (art) historical, phenomenological and, as I hope
to argue, performative concept. It discusses the different, often contradictory openings “landscape” holds,
starting from the history of aesthetics, landscape painting and the “bourgeois-ification” (Cauquelin 2004)
of the gaze. Landscape is a disciplined, framed entity suggesting a way of looking at the world through
lines, cut-outs and photographic devices. On the other hand, it is a spread-out field of sensibilities and
affect, used as a metaphor for heterogeneous yet correlational world without the usual focal point of human
body or narrative.
I suggest that landscape works on aesthetic, ethical and political levels. It is concretely shaped through and
by forces both within and beyond our comprehension – since industrialization forestry, transportation,
extractivism and climate change, directly resulting from the former, have left their marks on the landscape.
In this work, the focus is on one specific means of transportation: the train. Also known as the first
industrial object, train has worked as a force that pierces through the landscape violently and organizes
the world according to straight lines. At the same time, it has assembled our perception anew with its
cinematic and panoramic treatise of nature. My converging companion in this text is the artistic part of my
thesis project, On-Time Performance, a performance installation that unfolded during a single express train
journey from Helsinki to Kuopio in September 2025.
Yet the train does not represent an absolute evil; rather it is an ambiguous means of looking, on one hand
forcing the landscape into a strict frame and on the other, letting it perform through the windows and thus
become and almost active agent. I approach the landscape as a performance in this specific setting from a
phenomenological angle, drawing mostly from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasm, an intertwining
without complete submerging. I suggest this is what happens in allowing the passing landscape to turn into a
performance, and that this can lead to looking with and according to, rather than at; becoming empathetic
of the landscape and our surroundings while remaining at a critical distance that allows us to interpret
landscape as a performed – as in politically and socially constructed – phenomenon.