Landscape as a cultural product. Alicia Chillida

"I suspect that it is through the study of the indigenous that we will finally arrive at an overall definition of landscape and landscape beauty."
(John Brinckerhoff Jackson)

In the context of the 10th Lanzarote Landscape Biennial, dedicated to the anthropization of the territory and the interaction between humans and non-humans, this exhibition brings together the work of two multidisciplinary groups, one from the United States and the other from the Canary Islands, who share the same conception of landscape as a cultural product. With the aim of creating a context of mutual fertilization, their respective modes of observation and study of the territory are compared.

The presentation in Lanzarote of The Center for Land Use Interpretation, CLUIThe exhibition is a first contact between the Archipelago and the "Center for Land Use and Interpretation". The exhibition offers an overview of the activities, methodology and research on the territory of the United States developed by this great little institution since it was founded in 1994. Samples of the human footprint on the landscape are the subject of CLUI's work, whose exhibition method borrows from scientific research, geological reports, federal office documents, university studies and art exhibitions. The adoption of such unusual formats gives it an original and differentiated personality.

The work of Marta Peña and Jaime Gil, agricultural engineers, has implicit connections with the CLUI program in its critical and systematic observation of the local cultural landscape. The Canarian group conducts ethnobotanical research on the vascular flora of Lanzarote as a Biosphere Reserve. Cultivation techniques in traditional agriculture, the recovery of ancient crop varieties, the interpretation of the agricultural landscape and the cataloguing of the island's ethnoflora are some of the main lines of their work. The exhibition aims to open an international debate from Lanzarote, as it offers an exhaustive project on the alteration of El Jable, and the observation and denouncement of the transformations suffered by the protected landscape of La Geria and surrounding spaces. Through photographic images of aerial views and texts, their action is documented, together with an interview with the authors in video format, and a fieldwork: a Guided tour of La Geria and El Jable.

In the conviction that the "positive contamination" between the international and the local produces fruits that go beyond borders, the exhibition at the Ermita de Tías includes a selection of thirty posters which constitute a review of CLUI's research since its beginnings. CLUI proposes this exhibition format because, according to its director, Matthew Coolidge, "it provides a direct and effective entry into the multiplicity of the projects". As in the exhibition held at the Smithsonian American Museum, the posters are accompanied by texts that explain in simple terms the large-scale and long-term initiatives that CLUI develops through exhaustive research on the use and interpretation of each territory.

The exhibition presents a selection of CLUI's work up to the present day, including projects such as Subterranean Renovations: The Unique Architectural Spaces of Show Caves (Underground renovations: the unique spaces of cave architecture), that connect with such an idiosyncratic issue of Lanzarote as the cuevismo. Likewise, the exhibition includes the presentation of other projects such as Hollowed Earth: The Underground World of Business Parks (Hollow Earth: the subway world of business parks), visual and textual information from other initiatives of this institution on footprints such as those produced by human management of water, energy and waste, as well as by agriculture, excavations, industry, leisure, transportation, etc....

In spite of their humble nature as physical media, the posters contain photographs of great expressive and documentary value. At the Ermita de San Antonio they will be accompanied by the Landscan Bigham Canyon Mine to Kennecott Smelter, Utaha video on loop without text or narration, record of a specific project developed by CLUI.