È un paesaggio?

Is this a landscape?Is landscape a concrete or abstract entity? Is it material or immaterial? Can we touch it or just see it… or maybe only think of it and imagine it? Is it just an aesthetical experience? Is it useful? Is it natural or can it also be artificial? Is it a cultural elaboration? How do we experience it… individually or collectively… being at home, in a museum, or inside the landscape itself? Who can see the landscape and who cannot? The peasant or the scientist? Or neither of the two?...On the basis of these questions the essay compares fragments of different specific theories in order to outline a contemporary discourse on the recognition and the transformation of landscape: Lucius Burckhardt’s landscape experience through his “Strollology”; Alain Roger’s landscape recognition trough the ”Artialisation”, Lucius Burckhardt’s and Bernard Lassus’s “Theory of Minimal Intervention”, and Gilles Clement’s considerations about the “Third Landscape”.Palermo’s stretch of coastline (“lungo il mare”) is the area where these theories are tested, and becomes the object of description and transformation.