Abstract

The theoretical model of landscape that is still widespread is that of a spectacle-image that offers itself to a contemplative, detached and disembodied gaze. Rethinking landscape means investigating the role of the “aesthetic”, i.e. of bodily experience, characterized by sensitivity and movement. This experience, which is fundamentally interactive, has a formative and performative nature: the aisthesis is closely linked to praxis, to the concrete ways in which we re-late to the environment and which become interactive strategies. These strategies can become experiential habits that, if repeated in a mechanical way, can jeopardize the very interaction with the phenomenal world in which we are immersed. We tend to grasp only certain aspects of the phenomena that present themselves to us, over-looking not only the richness and plurality of the phenomenal world, but also its fundamental systemic and relational unity. The possibilities of formative and performative interaction can be grasped if the ordinary and daily level of experience is chal-lenged by sudden and unexpected encounters, which can initially provoke a sense of bewilderment and disorientation. What becomes “present” is the rhythmic unity of the phenomenal world, understood as an energetic momentum that holds together in a dynamic way the different elements of the world we inhabit. Through the con-cept of rhythm elaborated by Henri Maldiney we could advance a new aesthetic model of landscape understood as an actual cosmogenesis.