Unearthed Images.
Paintings from “The Series of the Months” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Riccardo Orsini

It looks like as if landscape falled down from the sky, once for all, but that was nothing more than a long aged illusion. Since generations the people have given the landscape a sense of time by hiding in there a multitude of ideals, images and objects. As if it were a textile carpet of many different thicknesses, the signs and knots of human intentionality are unmistakable. Thus, landscape was actually done by someone. Its use forces us to a cyclical archeology: one generation buries something, the following finds it. We try to extract “la nostra parte di ricchezza” (our personal slice of the matter, getting away with the loot), and then hide it again. Those who will come later, have discoveries to make. They just need to choose where to look at and when appropriate. They can also pretend to have not found out anything. Things first disappear and come back at the end, and every time they seem new (while samely). The ground, the soil, which is still the material of which the landscape is built, wraps and packs everything with its hairy surface, making a community surprise several times of the same thing.

It is clear that the landscape is not a simple territory, literally the Germanic word “landshaft” reminds us how artificial it can be, a “land”, “shaped” or “scoped” by a human being. The landscape of the latin: “pagus“,”pays” is instead “the paese (i.e. the small village town) of nature. “a reality strictly connected to its inhabitants who walks on its backs”. They use it, they do not worship such a thing, yet their relationship with landscape is so intense that they don’t tolerate any image that has not been unearthed from that. Those who inhabit it, look for the same thing in it for years, to the point that all those things have almost all become real.