HEMERA
Art is one of the main tools with which “shaping perception” creates landscape. This makes the role of the artist as interpreter of the land particularly important.
In the artistic tradition closest to us, the Modern, art developed two major strategies to address the natural environment. The historical avant-gardes preferred representation (such was the case of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Braque, of the German Brücke and Blaue Reiter, of Boccioni, Carra and Morandi, of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston); the vanguards of the postwar period favored direct intervention (as in the case of the Land Art of Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, et al., or to stay in Tuscany, the collections of outdoor art at Fattoria di Celle or Castello di Ama). Both strategies profoundly affected perceptions of the land—the first offering a subjective view of reality on the ground, the second correcting that reality.
The transition from the first to the second strategy carried important consequences for the art of the present. The evolution of artistic thought in the last century demanded, in fact, that art which relates to nature without interposition—that is, without the mediation of the canvas or photographic film—should impress upon it a distinctive mark of the artist’s subjectivity. The artist signed nature with his work and made it his own, appropriated it. In this way the relationship between subject and object was altered profoundly: no longer the interpreter of an existing reality, the artist became the creator of a new reality. All of nature was a canvas and the work, a late and extreme form of the abstract-expressionist gesture.
Today this kind of gesture is precluded. It is no longer in keeping with the kind of relationship we aspire to create between man and nature—a relationship based on full respect for the ecosystem integrity of natural areas—and it is no longer advantageous for the artist, whose “signature” is lost in the myriad of signs left by the gradual urbanization of the countryside, added to the complex of elements (power lines, wind turbines and progressively more impressive and articulate road infrastructure) whose presence makes the natural forms of the land less and less readable.
The strategy of Hemera is to reduce the background noise created by the urbanization of the natural environment to give, or restore, voice to nature. Hemera develops the inherent assets of ecosystems—defined, for the project’s purposes, as biological communities of interacting organisms and their physical environment—and it reinforces the historical, cultural and economic values that distinguish the rural tradition from than urban. It strives to improve the quality of life for farmers, who are in the first line of defense of the natural environment, leveraging techniques that have been lost over the centuries but are still recoverable in order to create landscapes that not only offer prospects for material sustainability, but also transmit the intangible, symbolic meanings that only art can convey. Combining the skills of farmers, scientists, technicians and artists, Hemera seeks to build not a discrete object—a sculpture or a park—but pride in tradition, by restoring dignity to the land and the worker who is its chief architect. This is not nostalgia. It is not a call for a return to historic agriculture or a movement for the creation a museum-landscape. The signal Hemera endeavors to send is that cutting-edge technology can be combined with traditional and local knowledge to create a new and universally shared reality.
The artist of the last century used the landscape to manifest his ego, to increase his visibility; the Hemera artist will use his ego to manifest the landscape.
Download the Hemera pdf.
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Paul Blanchard 