International Congress

Uncertain Landscapes: ​Beyond Transdisciplinary Approaches​

22-24 Nov. 2023

Guimarães

We understand landscape as an open term: a cultural mediator that builds relationships between societies and the environment, and a process under permanent construction with a permeable border. This premise turns the landscape into something transitory and in constant change, moving away from the hegemonic, universal and deterministic principles that seek to control territories, crystallize places and fixate images.

Our position towards the built environment cannot be limited to being a mere observer. We are part of it and that old dominant or complacent perspective has radically changed: proximity has replaced distance, uncertainty has weakened any framework, and complexity has destroyed harmony. So, what is the landscape for? For decades we speculated on uncertainty as a condition to be taken into account when working with landscapes, today we are sure that the only possible relational framework is based precisely on uncertainty.

Uncertain Landscapes are a possible dialogue between those heterogeneous and discontinuous “critical zones” identified by Bruno Latour, and where epistemological conflicts converge. Uncertain Landscapes are useful to highlight the invisible, the variable and the multiple. Moreover, Uncertain Landscapes, as transversal mediators, can simultaneously address different scales, times and disciplines , revealing complexities in a simple way. The gaze will no longer be decisive in defining these landscapes; perhaps it could be an experience, a collective demand, the crossing of knowledge or of new forms of expression. But since they are uncertain, they will quickly be replaced by something more useful. Or not.

This congress aims to approach landscape as a conceptual tool to rethink our way of being in the world, break disciplinary boundaries in the search for answers to the problems of the present, in the relationship between human beings and the spaces they inhabit, in addition to also being a tool for the construction of a diverse future, one based on knowledge of the past, and fluid between the permeability of the territory and respect for the environment.

To this end, we invite abstract and paper proposals from scholars, professionals, theorists, etc. working in research areas such as, architecture, landscape architecture, archaeology, visual arts, media and communication studies, history, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, history of art, photography, geography, geology, different branches of the natural sciences and any other related research fields.

Website: uncertainlandscapes.weebly.com