Landscapes of memory

Author: 
Dr. Yael Arnon

Designing the geographical landscape and transforming it into a place that makes a symbolic, religious, or political statement and connects between landscape, culture and politics is known as "landscape reading". Landscapes etched in a person's memory often take on meanings that go beyond the realistic depictions of the landscape itself. The memory experience depends on the age of the individual or on a particular event that communicates the landscape and is imprinted upon the artist’s individual or collective memory. Deciphering the symbols embodied in the description of a landscape may reflect the artist’s political or religious identity or both. In describing the landscapes of their childhood, Palestinian artists choose to depict both the utopia of the past and the reality of the present. Palestinian art is often preoccupied with the natural or urban landscape and the manner in which political factors determine how the landscape is treated, appropriated and broken down. Within the landscape, are cherished ideological concepts related to land, place, and homeland, as well as to memory, whether real or imagined. Dealing with the landscape is not always a free choice and is sometimes forced for political or social reasons. Geographical and cultural research studies in recent years have involved landscape reading. In this article, I discuss a number of works of art that reflect this theory.

Paper No: 
4881