Landscape and conflict. Experiences and frontier places

International Landscape Study Days

2015, eleventh edition
Treviso, 12th and 13th February

The International Landscape Study Days, the eleventh in the series, will continue the tradition of critical discussion and reappraisal of issues associated with the Foundation’s research concerns, focussing in particular on the study and care of places, a theme that has been explored together with experts from various disciplinary fields in the Study Days of recent years.

The topic chosen for 2015, Landscape and conflict. Experiences and frontier places, is an expression of the desire to study places in this condition, both near and far away, and to identify any evidence they may embody of signs of hope or processes of change, whether latent or on-going, from a state of conflict and border towards experiences we recognize as akin to our vision of landscape.

The Study Days will provide an opportunity to compare experiences of different kinds and appraisals by experts from different areas of study and research: from the viewpoint of the natural and agrarian sciences, which have always been attentive to such phenomena, to that of landscape specialists and geographers and to the perspective of those who focus on urban situations which are often by their nature frontier places or buffer areas, as well as on the vast world of peripheries and of the many social contradictions they represent.

An extension of the 2014 theme of Caring for the land, then, with an exploration of subjects through which the sense of belonging, the dimension of time and the desire to be associated with a place develop specifically from a condition of conflict in frontier areas where there is a perceptible desire to keep a connection alive, or to deny it, and to reflect on the value of landscape at this moment in time.