Unfamiliar Territory_Research

already on its way to becoming-different as it alters and is altered by the processes designing can never fully
envision, let alone determine.
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7.2 learning-through-making 4
Design project (intervention into the becoming of Fort the Vaujours) with its alternative take on design
methodologies directly links back to the notion of control, especially in times and places of tension. When
differences as cracks in the system appear (disturbed sites as perhaps the most obvious case inside landscape
architecture), signalling to the potential transformative moment in the field, they are quickly erased,
familiarized and disconnected from their liberatory potential – a landscape brought back to life. This is
problematic as it compromises and reduces the complexity of the site for the sake of instrumentality and
prescribes it one and only possible future. Looking back on the design project, what perhaps stands out as its
most characteristic feature is its refusal to appear like anything finished or complete, its unwillingness to fix
relations and simultaneously exercise total control over a piece of land.
Project with its initial outset to operate in-between the binaries and to overcome the nature-culture divide
attempts to demonstrate ways in which landscapes could actively meet concerns of our social reality today and
explicitly works towards exposing that a certain modern way of life is not a given but requires a lot of effort to
create and sustain itself. This is where the project connects to the intentions of many contemporary works of
landscape architecture that claim to encourage ‘environmental awareness’. But contrary to the majority of
produced work today, this is not done through ‘surface greenification’ but rather by overcoming indifference to
all of the less ‘clean’ aspects of our present condition that make it possible in the first place and by overturning
inertia through the aesthetic power of affect. An ecologically sound approach and the employment of systemic
thinking are therefore seen as a means and not an end in itself.
In a way the project could as well be described as a ‘continuous participatory design’ but one where feedback is
not recorded in conference rooms or on screen using computer modelling but rather on site where design in
time responds to and is shaped by conditions of a specific locality and where actors involved in the design
process are not exclusively human. This constant incompleteness and interdependent dialogue between human
and non-human would make an actual experience of the designed proposal most likely not particularly visually
and experientially familiar but ambiguous and daring, challenging the extent of human agency, apparent
landscape stability and the categories of ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’ to the point of questioning the longstanding
tradition of landscape experience-through-vision itself.
Proposed landscape intervention is compared to common remediation design techniques not planned nor
expected to have immediate effects. In fact, if successful, its most powerful effects are observed in the long run.
Putting emphasis on landscape design aesthetic through affect removes the search after an instant ‘solution’ and
puts forward a perfomative take on design, where landscape embraces uncertainty and in time strives towards a
multitude of affective encounters with ethically and politically enabling potentials. In this way design combines
performative capacities with its power of cultural expression, not striving to stay fixed in the ‘here and now’ but
using the ‘here and now’ as a basis from where to lay the groundwork for people, publics, landscapes and
communities to come. Therefore, it is through alternative production of not merely individual human
subjectivities but importantly also collective and political ones that design proposal wishes to address
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