landscape looking
workshop
April 2021
Zurich University of the Arts // bachelor’s course
August 2021, September 2023
Design Biennale Zurich // open course
The relationship we have to landscape is often reduced to the lens of a camera or a single image we post on social media. However, landscape is not as resilient or unchanging as it might appear in a photograph or painting, and this is becoming increasingly more apparent today as we are seeing the devastating effects climate change has on our outdoor environment.
In this workshop we examined the ways we view and experience landscape and explored new approaches to intentionally look at landscape to build a greater understanding and appreciation of our fragile outdoor environments. Participants stepped away from their computers and spent time outside observing their outdoor surroundings.
Participants were free to articulate and document their observations through sketches, writing, experiments with photography and sound recordings. Observing and noticing were the focuses of the workshop, and participants were encouraged to use documentation methods such as sketching to enhance the observation process, rather than judging or worrying about the finality or precision of the drawings.
By using lenses as aesthetic strategies for landscape observations, like studying the lines or shapes of the landscape, zooming in and out of the landscape in view and considering the foreground, middle ground and background, participants discovered their outdoor environments in new ways, noticed details of their familiar landscapes previously unperceived and questioned their perceptions and relationship to the outside world.
Workshop also found on:
Institut für Designforschung (IDE)
ZHdK Textures of Sustainability
Design Biennale Zurich 2021
Design Biennale Zurich 2023