New Landscapes - New Compositions

This symposium is conceived in continuation of last year’s event, New Landscapes: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Necessity. While those conversations explored the ethical and aesthetic implications of ongoing landscape transformations, this year we turn more directly to the ways landscape is actively read, drawn, mapped, planned, designed, and maintained under such conditions.

We propose composition as a shared theme for this inquiry.

By composition, we imply a way of working with relations, connections, and forms of coexistence: between topography, soil, water, vegetation, infrastructure, use, cultural history, aesthetic experience, and more-than-human life. In this sense, composition describes a situated practice of attending to differences, tensions, interdependencies, and possibilities within specific sites and situations. It concerns how landscapes are arranged, and how they are brought into relation, shaped, transformed, and sustained over time.

The symposium is intended as an open forum for practitioners, researchers, teachers, and students working across landscape architecture, planning, environmental humanities, artistic research, and related fields. We are particularly interested in approaches to composition as a method, an aesthetic technique, and a professional mode of attention—whether in site analysis and mapping, drawing and design, practices of transformation and maintenance, or in the interplay between scientific, technical, narrative, and sensory forms of knowledge.

The symposium is free and open to all. Registration is required by email to guro.sollid@kglakademi.dk
It will be conducted in English.

Programme

09.00 - 09.15: Welcome and introduction

09.15 - 10.45: 
International Keynote I - Moderator: Maja Zander Fisker (Royal Danish Academy):

• Hélène Frichot: ‘The Landscape Sees: On Expressionism, Environment-Worlds and Becoming Vegetal’

11.00 - 12.00: Session A - Negotiations, Storying - Moderator: Jonna Majgaard Kraarup (Royal Danish Academy):

• Birthe Urup (Det Blå)
• Hanne Haack Larsen (Aage V. Jensens Foundation)
• Henrik Oxvig (Royal Danish Academy)

Lunch

13.00 - 14.00: Session B - Methods, Tools - Moderator: Kristine Annabell Torp (Royal Danish Academy): 

• Helga Grønnegaard (Urland)
• Lea Porsager (Artist)
• Flemming Rafn (Rafn Studio)

14.15 - 15.45: International Keynote II - Moderator: Guro Sollid (Royal Danish Academy): 

• Alexandra Arènes: ‘The Critical Zone: From Compositionism to Cosmopolitics?’

16.00: Final Remarks: Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin (Royal Danish Academy)

16.15 - 17.00: Drinks and informal discussions