The “landscape face”
A Portuguese familiar expression
In Portuguese, we have a familiar expression, “being with a landscape face.” This relatively common expression is used when you feel someone is extremely thoughtful, looking lost, and abstracted in some “unconstructive” or unhelpful concern or thought. It can also mean “pretending that nothing happened”, “acting that it’s not up to us”, that we didn’t participate or do anything. Having a landscape face relates to not knowing or not wanting to be involved in what is happening, as if one is lost in the story, not engaging in the relationship or intimacy with what is happening. It is an expression that reveals a shield of separation between us and the context.
In fact, it reveals much more than that, as it expresses the deep (cultural) disconnect with our places and landscapes.
Two tragic assumptions are part of this seemingly innocent expression:
That a landscape is something you can’t read is abstract, separate, and “out there.”
That by adopting a “landscape face,” we get inert and mysterious scenery.
This cultural idea that a landscape is inert and unreadable is anthropocentric and extremely limited to human’s real and ancestral intimate relationship with their places.
For populations who bound and belong to the places they inhabit, a landscape is never abstract. What is more real and concrete than a complex living system that sustains and nourishes us each day, every day?
A landscape is a living symbiosis in deep reciprocity between countless open systems, giving us water to drink, air to breathe, food, medicine, myths, memories, and wisdom (just to name a few, for it entangles all aspects and dimensions of life). In this rich ancestral legacy, every landscape is alive and full of immanent meanings. The dangerous myth of the separation between humans (mental) and nature is unreal and impossible. The body always inhabits the landscape and vice versa, in a living complexity that allows life itself in all its spectrum. But the exile of modern culture induces us to think otherwise.
The expression “landscape face” is very violent because it speaks of our orphanhood as a culture, of having been expelled from paradise and now living with crumbs of distant and abstract meanings, when the abundance is already here: in the topography, in the rocks, in the weather patterns, in the plants that grow around us and the animals that live here.