What is a landscape? If it is already difficult to answer this question, even only from a
definitional point of view, it becomes even more complex to answer the question, “how is a
landscape represented?” Starting from this premise, my research analyzes a modest
Sicilian hilly landscape, which becomes the archetype of the ideal landscape, proposing to
the viewer its possible representations. From a drawing on paper to the satellite image,
from the word “landscape” printed on a dictionary to the screenshot of the source code of a
.jpg file, from a scan of a 10x12cm negative film to the still-life of small stones taken from
the analyzed site, each of these representations reveals a possible vision of the same
landscape. The possible landscape then becomes the set of all these proposed images,
and as in the final scene of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of cherry”, the photographic medium
is revealed (here through a mirror) reminding the viewer of the illusion and artificiality of
each of these individual representations and the consequent impossibility of answering the
initial question.
All images ©Andrea Camiolo