Time and landscape

Abstract

This essay deals with the landscape as spatialization of time, which when apprehended in the rare gardens
that occur in the scenic desert in contemporary world, may point out to new possibilities to the thought. Dialoguing with philosophers, landscape historians and artists, it shows how the two distinct landscape genesis, the Chinese and western traditions, treated the issue of time and space. The former puts its emphasis in landscape as reconciliation of opposites, a path to be complemented by imagination, where as the latter emphasizes the outcomes. Made hegemonic nowadays, the western rationality places in different fields man and nature, time and space, mostly setting predatory temporariness that violently imposes itself upon the slow temporality that qualifies the places.