Walking as a relational act
Modernity meant the understanding of reality in a dichotomous way, nature and culture seemed not to touch, but this form of relationship between the social and nature has been reoriented throughout history, gaining special strength since the 1980s; authors such as Donna Haraway (1991) already described the blurring of the boundaries between the animal and the human, organisms and machines, the physical and the non-physical. Or, in more modern terms, as Bruno Latour points out in his Actor Network Theory (ANT), the distribution of power can only be understood through a relational effect.
In the same way that Lefebvre (1974) differentiated the “representations of space”, logics of normalization of the world that linked technical and rational knowledge, and “the spaces of representation” as symbolic constructions created through their actors, we can approach landscapes as containers of interpretations in which “every activity and representation will either question or confirm the dominating ways of seeing and ways of acting within the landscape” (Qviström & Saltzman, 2006). Places with previous marks, in which the interventions of the designers are part of a process subject to the actions of dynamic and unpredictable natural and cultural forces. […] as expressions of the entropic passage of time (Fig.6) (Beardsley, 2000).
Fig. 6 — Documented walking experience[11] at shore edge project[12] (four seasons). Capture of ephemeral states of the landscape. (Source: author's own compilation).
[11] “The main thing we do is subtraction [...] In essence what is created is an action plan, not a master plan”, says Martí Franch (Estudi Martí Franch, EMF) referring to the shore edge project: "on the bank of the River Ter opposite the historic centre of Girona (Spain). Where the path once followed a ruler-straight maintenance road, glaringly paved in white gravel, there is now a parallel route that brings people into the space of the river. It is palpably cooler, shaded. The river becomes audible, a balm to the senses." (Waterman, 2017).
