What is a landscape? If it’s already difficult to answer this question, even from a definitional point of view, it becomes even more complex to answer the question of how landscapes are represented.
With this premise as a starting point, my research analyses a modest Sicilian hilly landscape, which becomes the archetype of the ideal landscape – proposing a series of possible representations to the viewer. From a drawing on paper to a satellite image, from the word “landscape” printed in a dictionary to a screenshot of the source code of a .jpg file, from a scan of a 4x5 negative to a still-life of small stones taken from the chosen site; each of these representations reveals a distinct vision of the same landscape. The landscape then becomes the sum of all these proposed images, and – as in the final scene of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry – the photographic medium is then revealed. The effect reminds the viewer of the illusion and artificiality of each of these individual representations, and the consequent impossibility of answering the initial question.
