Underground

“What lies beneath our feet? Secrets, patterns, connections, traces”, as Robert Macfarlane writes. Underground, the map of relations between human beings and nature becomes complex but also sharper, and from the underground world one can emerge with greater awareness.
Gathering a series of suggestions from landscape architecture, ecology, the natural sciences, environmental art, anthropology and the emerging area of study of the environmental humanities, it proposes a reflection on the possibility of shifting our gaze on the landscape from the surface to its deepest dimension, suggesting a more complex and interconnected image of life on Earth, made up of intricate, invisible and subterranean relationships that naturally also involve Homo sapiens but do not see this species as the absolute and dominant protagonist.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
A change of course that invites us, once again, to reflect on the need to extend the framework of investigations and design tools that allow us to understand the contemporary meaning of landscape, in both its theoretical and operational aspects.

The Study Days were preceded on Friday 14 February by the Underland online preview conference with Robert Macfarlane, writer, literary critic, professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, author of the book Underland. A journey through deep time (Einaudi, 2020).