Landscapes as Installations: a dialogue with contemporary spaces

Abstract

Nature has always been the object of appreciation of landscapes, which have been historically conceived in paintings that hold great rhetorical potentiality. However, in contemporary times, the installations – recognized as elements of the sculptural field – have changed the relationship between observer and image and added a new dimension to the natural landscape, which is additionally mediated by the exhibition spaces. These are the cases of Olafur Eliasson's “Riverbed” and Oscar Oiwa's “Paraíso”. Both installations, which are the objects of analysis of this article, portray nature differently from the tradition of paintings and, when examined through an intertextual perspective – which takes as reference here seminal concepts for these more current art forms –, bring forth a political and affective dialogue with the very place they are in, both territorially and institutionally.