A Sustainable Approach to the Threatened Landscape Through the Visual Arts

Abstract

During recent decades, global warming and rapid climate change have led to an increase in forest fires worldwide and especially in the territories of south-central Chile and Chilean Patagonia, modifying the landscape of these areas. These events generate a fracture in the aesthetic perception of territories. The natural, ancestral landscape is threatened by imminent transformation. Fire destroys its ancient forests and its biodiversity. Paradoxically, this dramatic, catastrophic action generates an image of rare beauty; an “aesthetic of devastation”, born of its ineluctable disintegration. Everything is transformed from live plant matter to the inert remains of what was once a dense, flourishing, ancient forest. The green woodland is transformed into charred trunks, charcoal, and finally ashes. Erosion threatens to change the image of our landscape and the life that inhabits it. Artistic creation reflects this implacable process, and how nature is transformed into something different; what appears to be an equilibrium of astonishing aesthetic beauty becomes an anti-aesthetic natural phenomenon with its own strange beauty, now disfigured and warped by disaster. Today violation, systematic destruction, waste of resources and the total lack of protection for our environment wake in the artist an act of reaction-creation, the representation of which through art can show this loss of equilibrium and express the progressive vulnerability of our environment and its inevitable perdition. Artistic creation is a medium which can emphasise the importance of caring for our natural heritage in order to maintain the sustainability of this equilibrium.