Troubling the Ideal Landscape: A Critical Visual Narrative
This practice-based research project questions how artistic strategies of (de)composition can trouble the ideological mechanisms shaping contemporary notions of the 'ideal landscape'. It explores how such strategies contribute to reimagining these mechanisms and the ideals they produce.
My hometown Cannero Riviera in northern Italy serves as a case study. The project takes local vistas, imagined as ideal, as a starting point for critical inquiry. Drawing on Warburgian perspectives, I approach these vistas, often characterised by imported flora, as epistemic vessels: (moving)images that carry, reactivate, and transform cultural meaning in time and space.
Through primarily situated drawing, video, and spatial montage, I explore how idealised imagery persists and shifts in meaning as it circulates across temporal and spatial contexts. My aim is to expose and engage with the latent ideological structures embedded in these compositions.
Two models of spatial montage are employed in this research project with a view to facilitating the conceptualisation of the moving images produced, which are in resonance with the ideal landscape: The tableau thus aligns with the crystallisation of the ideal. The table is a dynamic, open-ended composition that echoes the contingencies of the physical landscape.
These models inform a circular, iterative method that I term ‘(de)composition’: a nonlinear practice of fragmentation and recomposition oriented towards anachronism. By (de)composing idealised imagery of physical landscape, the project interrogates how such imagery both legitimises and obscures socio-political processes such as displacement, extractivism, and imperialism.
Framed by this inquiry, the central research question asks: to what extent can a practice-based method of (de)composing landscape, through drawing, video, and spatial montage, critically address the ideological mechanisms embedded in contemporary processes of idealisation? ‘Troubling the Ideal Landscape: A Critical Visual Narrative’ responds by developing visual arguments that challenge dominant Western aesthetics of idealisation and open space for imagining alternative understandings of the ideal.
Artist and researcher Ilaria Biotti (1982, IT) studied fine arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florenz, at the HKU, Utrecht, and at the Institut for Art in Context, UdK, Berlin.
In her practice, Biotti explores the actualization of imagination as a primeval agent in the production of urban landscapes through and within digital video. She thereby examines collective and personal abstract thought and meta-narratives related to the non-human. Her inquiries are often driven by microhistorical process-oriented and research-based methodologies.
Biotti has participated in international exhibitions and residences, among which the 5th Athens Biennale OMONOIA, Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Goethe Institut Bogota, Istituto di Cultura Italiano Cape Town, NSK State Pavilion – 57th Venice Biennale, Tate Exchange London, and Transmediale CAPTURE ALL Berlin.
She is part of the steering committee of the artist association Peninsula.