Troubling the Ideal Landscape A Visual Narrative
(2025)
author(s): Ilaria Biotti
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Troubling the Ideal Landscape – A Visual Narrative critically examines possible intersections between imagination and physical landscape. Through a practice-based approach, this exposition explores the composition and decomposition of ideal landscapes, with a focus on Cannero Riviera, a small Italian village. Grounded in my doctoral research at PhDArts, a collaboration between ACPA, Leiden University, and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the project employs spatial montage as both a methodological tool and an artistic outcome.
By fragmenting the landscape into moving images, I seek to disrupt conventional visual regimes and reflect on the ideological forces shaping the village and its environment. This approach is informed by Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, where fragmented images form unstable constellations that navigate multiple meanings, temporalities, and spaces. Engaging with Warburg’s method, I question crystallised, linear visualisations of the ideal, focusing on dynamic processes of spatial composition.
The exposition aims to reframe landscape imagery not as a passive backdrop, but as an active force. It proposes a model of the ideal landscape that resists linearity, embracing a complex, shifting narrative that questions the visual regimes through which contemporary imaginaries of place are constructed.
Journal for Troubling Ideal Landscapes (JTIL)
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Ilaria Biotti
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Emerging from a situated artistic practice, The Journal for Troubling Ideal Landscapes addresses the urgent need to (de)compose and critically reimagine the ideal landscape as a contested visual construct. It foregrounds artistic and cross-disciplinary approaches that expose its historical, political, and affective entanglements.
