Flirting with space: thinking landscape relationally

Abstract

For over a decade landscape has been exemplary of the critical debates between representational and so-called non-representational theories affecting cultural geographies. At the same time discussions concerning mobility contest the familiar emphasis upon the habitual and situated character of landscape and its role in the work of representations.This article offers a contribution to the growing awareness of a need to try and engage these debates surrounding landscape across geographical, anthropological, cultural and art theory amongst others. It considers different debates on landscape through the notion of spacing particularly in terms of how we understand artwork and representation, insistently in comparison with wider kinds of practice. Landscape is considered as the expressive-poetics of spacing in a way that makes possible a dynamic relationality between representations and practices both situated and mobile.