Rivers as divides and connection places

ABSTRACT “Oklahoma – Nararachi, peyote road landscapes” puts together science and art knowledge, this thesis work deals with images and words, memory and identity, travel and trance to build landscapes. Traveling by car, on the road, trip starts in Oklahoma, goes on through Texas, Arizona, California, and New Mexico, crossing the border towards Chihuahua, to finish at the Sierra Tarahumara. It is an artistic exploration and research work conducted as a work in progress, following the contemporary Cheyenne poet Lance Henson. This work provides a crossing of glances crossing photography (Cabanzo Francisco, visual artist), documentary film (Federico Lanchares, documentarist) and poetry languages (Lance Henson, poet and writer, Sundance ceremonial dancer, Dogsoldier clan member, trip guide). This effort helps make landscapes emerge, overlap, contrast or be complementary, the documentary trip format, “road movie”, adopted reinforces the idea of the transit: creative action as trance practices, transit as process of self-conscousness, life itself as time-space transit, existence transcendence linked to transitory identities, to flowing of situations and places, construction of transitory characters and identities mixing and contamination, mutations of ambiguous spatial and symbolic syncretism. Research work has been functionally focused towards a documentary project, begining with research assistance, the construction of the characterizations, and the hypothetical trip routes formulation. The work was extended in it’s objectives and results horizon. It developed into a work in process project a three hands storyboard, and preproduction successive re-project drafts writing. It also envolved direction assistance and project production management filming in Italy and then in the United States and Mexico. And finally visual and written results edition, treatment and interaction within public in the form of an artist book and an exhibition installation. The outcome of the field investigation, in addition to the results refered above, consists in a theorical and conceptual state of arts revision related to trascendcental arts. The thesis is presented in three parts: Part ONE contains the artistic and field work results. Photographic record of trip, scouting backstage and impressions of daily life (white and black) contrasting with insights and trance moments (treated polarized color and sound sequences), poetry writings facsimile (digital treatment) to add the ‘trip diary’ poems and writings. An artists book format is used for images and texts contrast contents within an interactive exhibition format conceived as a space installation mixing texts and photos with traces and objects collected during the trip. Sculptures of spatial archetypes help expectators-participants interaction activating trance sequences and sounds. The intraction helps to build his own experience from his own point of view, both perceptive and cultural. Building new landscapes. Closing the installation, people can see two documentaries loop, "Words from the edge" and "impressions from peyote road", (two pieces, of an unfinished triptych). Part TWO contains a secondary sources review, as part of field work preliminary research. The theoretical framework, the focal orientation, as well as the characterizations of characters, situations, ceremonies and places, plus hypothetical routes and the research and artistic experimentation conclusions. The project remains open, conclusions are partial and presented as impressions besides possible transcendental art research and experimental developments. Part THREE annex contains partial fieldwork results. Interviews and diaries, online key words information research and poems analysis. Significance territory density tables and maps. Exhibition installation and documentary projects. NOTE FOR THIS RESUMED VERSION Readers will notice a great difference between this resume and the complete version of this thesis, composed by three parts in two volumes. First of all, this is the resume of the second part, in which images or any visual material were taken away. It also lacks the artistic graphic and video material contained in part one plus two DVDs with videos. The thing is that as there has not still been invented a method, or a language, able to resume images and sounds, and an effort to do so would have finished by just “cutting” ones or “leaving” others, with no plausible solution in terms of content and significacy. Therefore the choise was to eliminate them all. The absence of any visual material underlines the value of arts and visual discourses by themselves in the epistemological order, as vicual and sound information is crucial for art’s process of building discourses and knowledge. This text also has no references or notes, just surnames of authors in parenthesis. Secondary information elaborations are contained in part three. No examples and cases that support the hipotesis are contained here, they can be found in the part two of the thesis.

Leonardo, 2003

The author argues for the importance of art in the exploration of ecological relationships. Art can help engender an understanding of and connection to the natural world, illuminate values and illustrate ecological processes. Various artistic strategies used by the artist are discussed, including performances that document close observation of place, site-specific artwork that offers the opportunity to look at the natural and cultural environment in a a new way, and digital imaging and web design that encourages a careful reading of representation through juxtaposition of imagery.

Grey Room

Revista VIS, Vol. 18, No. 1. Brasília: UnB, p.165-168. , 2019

Ainda sem tradução para o português, a obra reúne um conjunto de reflexões que problematizam proposições artísticas que discutem o uso político da paisagem. Esta, é abordada como o resultado das complexas relações sociais e econômicas contemporâneas. Os projetos e textos catalogados (alguns escritos pelos próprios artistas) partem do ponto de vista norte americano; porém, também incorporam referências teóricas e análises de práticas que ocorrem ao redor do mundo, em âmbito local ou regional. Os autores buscam responder a diversas questões: "de que formas a terra, formada ao longo do tempo geológico, também contemporâneo, é formada pelas condições do presente?", "como o ambiente e as estruturas econômicas estão relacionadas?", "como a arte pode estimular maneiras mais sutis de pensamento e sobre a interação com a terra?" e "como a arte pode contribuir para a expansão da justiça espacial e ambiental?" (p.16). Nota-se nestas inquietações que o termo "terra" substitui em muitos momentos o termo "paisagem". A substituição é justificada pelo caráter político atrelado ao "valor de uso" da terra, por razões práticas e ideológicas. Embora se reconheça o peso que o conceito de "paisagem" tenha na História da Arte, os problemas de representação são abordados de maneira diversa dos modos de representação paisagística tradicional. Assim, o conceito de landscape (paisagem) é retomado no sentido etimológico, que origina do holandês landschap. A este está atrelada a idéia de "mútua formação e modelagem da terra e do homem", noção da qual a história se distanciou pela confusão conceitual notada pelo antropólogo Tim Ingold. (p.19) O enfoque na representação pictórica privilegiou a ideia do "olhar" em detrimento das práticas habituais de manuseio da terra, características de uma comunidade agrária.

The India chapter of BRICS artistic research project (November, 2018) under the theme 'Geographies of Gender' was conducted with intensive field interaction through audiovisual mode for three days in two locations in the state of Madhya Pradesh: medieval temple town of Maheshwar besides sacred Narmada river, and Mandu, a city of medieval ruins of grand Indo-islamic architecture, ranging from palaces, mosques and fortifications in the Vindhya hill ranges. During the stay in the field, the six researchers and three students got to meet different people and families with different occupations across various strata of social and religious divide. By the end of the field research, each researcher came up with few minutes of edited 'audio-visual notes' as proposals for artistic research emanating from the field encounters. One important part of the methodology was to create an audiovisual pool from all the image and sound capturing devices used by all members of the team irrespective of their specific view points, to create the possibility of inter-subjective discourses and polysemy to emerge out of same set of images. As one of the researcher, the present author chose to work with few images, rather image-ideas, where gender-concerns seemed to merge, at times with gender-performances and obscure practices of daily life.

Afterimage: the journal of media arts and criticism, 2010

Confluence of Knowledge: Multidisciplinary, International Peer Reviewed Journal , 2019

People are unconsciously possessed by the instinct to damage the world around them. Their unknowing actions have caused the destruction of nature and upset its delicate balance; it is difficult to be sure whether an individual can actually create any positive impact. People need to be especially careful with regards to deforestation, reducing the use of plastic and conservation of environment and wildlife reserves through individual care. An artist can, to a certain degree, create awareness in society through visually rendering such observations. It can certainly be achieved as there are millions of people who are concentrating on this issue and taking small steps to conserve the environment every day. Furthermore, visual art's capability to interconnect people and ideas in creative ways brings with it the probability of engaging the public's attention in issues that might otherwise not enter general consciousness. The issues could be associated with such visual artistic actions among those who are unaware of their participation in the destruction of their environment. The core desire of this study is to focus on the concern for growing one's own awareness in environmental ecosystems and ecological intolerance through creative presentation i.e. organizing exhibitions based on paintings that contain such forms, colors and textures that are intrinsically related to ecological damage. The methodology was split into three phases-applying innovative materials to create surface of canvas, exploring such forms to present thoughts inherently, and participating in many exhibitions countrywide. Consequently the outcomes exhibited and accepted by the audience contain the intention to increase consciousness to preserve what remains.

IJASOS- International E-journal of Advances in Social Sciences, 2015

This paper addresses the concept of an integrated perspective of place through participatory design in public art, namely in the development of the artistic projects Paths of Salt and Artistic Interactions with Cacela Velha. It begins with the explanation of the guiding concepts of the research and methodologies, such as place, emphatic and participatory approaches, alluding to the active investigation; and finishes with a detailed description of both projects and the analysis of their results.

Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2019