The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) will host the conference entitled Nature as non-landscape: actions, studies and works from contemporary art, which will be given by the Professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Aurora Fernández Polanco, next Thursday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m.
The event will take place in the José Saramago room (La Plazuela, Arrecife), and will also be broadcast live on the FCM website and YouTube channel.
During her presentation, Fernández Polanco will reflect on the modern separation between culture and nature established in current critical debates. This, in her opinion, questions the figure of a spectator who, separated from nature, frames it as a landscape for his aesthetic enjoyment.
The professor will draw a panorama supported by "lost" proposals and investigate the hidden works behind the picturesque or the sublime in order to reach the examples that, from the contemporary arts, are committed to "useful" works, studies or actions and thus try to get involved in the construction of imaginaries that allow us to manage the ecosocial crisis in which we live.
This conference is part of the Divergent Views reflection space. A forum in which critics, historians and art professors have participated to review the assessments and canonical concepts established in contemporary culture on historical stages, trends, artistic movements, especially outstanding personalities or the connections between the different arts. Since its origins, this cycle has been attended by scholars such as Estrella de Diego, Kosme de Barañano, Aurora García, Juan Manuel Bonet, Victoria Combalía, Simón Marchán, María del Corral, Manuel Borja Villel, Lynne Cooke or Luis Fernández-Galiano, among others, and recently, Eduardo Prieto.
Aurora Fernández Polanco is a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UCM. She has been Principal Investigator of R&D Projects such as Critical Visualities: Cultural Ecologies and Investigations of the Common. She is the editor of the magazine Re-visiones, in which an investigative writing supported by images is carried out with the aim of demonstrating the epistemic nature of the same.
She is also the author of several publications: Thinking about the image / Thinking with images, Proposal for the future: against the political separation between "fine" arts and crafts, and the book Visual criticism of solitary knowledge. She has also co-edited the collection of books Destruction and Construction of the Territory. Memory of Spanish Places, published by the UCM.