P=S+N

P=S+N (Paesaggio= Soggetto+ Natura) is the title of the first landscape festival organized in Castelfranco Veneto. The project was born from the collaboration between OMNE and the Library-Museum-Archive Service and proposed, through a series of activities and public meetings based on different disciplines and knowledge, a reflection on contemporary landscapes, using methods and approaches useful to an objective decipherment (but also subjective as regards artistic expressions) of the landscape itself.

P=S+N is a formula taken from the well-known comparatist and landscape theorist Michael Jakob, who defined the landscape (P) as the link, the encounter and the interaction between a subject (S) and nature (N). The landscape, therefore, is the fruit of nature no less than man.

In the last two decades the theme of landscape, not as a mere factor of aesthetic contemplation but as a complex field within which subject/man and object/nature interact deeply and continuously, has been the protagonist, both on the scientific and media, of a growing interest.

Scholars of different skills and formations and artists working in various fields have identified the landscape as a key to privileged access to the understanding of the present time. On the one hand, this is in continuity with old disciplinary traditions (literature, art history, anthropology, geography, land planning, architecture, aesthetics…) and artistic (painting, photography, cinematography…) and on the other it intercepts a sensitivity towards the “environmental issues” from year to year more alive in civil society.

The series of meetings, exhibitions, conferences, walks in the territory and workshops, organized on the occasion of the festival, has tried to identify, precisely in the broad meaning of landscape, a key to privileged access to the understanding of the present.