50@50 – Culture Within
In my blog, 50@50, I explore how the landscape creates and/or contributes to the culture of Place. Certainly, examples can be shown that people have manipulated the land and altered its appearance and ecosystem, emptied its cavities – all to satisfy hunger, fulfill dreams, and line pockets. In some cases, émigrés from far away attempted to replicate their homeland onto new landscapes.
But what about the place that exists within a person? There’s and old adage, “you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy”. This phenomenon is often the place of origin, but not always. I had the privilege of meeting with several people this past week that reflect a deep culture of the landscape WITHIN – all of whom express it in their art and/or professional life.
Cecilia Parades is a Peruvian artist whose work deals with the concepts of origin, environment, nature and self. In a gallery exhibition in San Antonio, she discussed how as she moved to different places, she felt she needed to connect with her new environment as well as her origin. Often this was a place of, or representation of, nature. She both inhabits and transforms place. In her earlier photographs, she inhabits the landscape of nature, as part of it. In her most recent photographic work, the lines between self and place blur. For her sculpture, she re-uses natural materials and infuses her physical objects with values and beliefs of Peruvian significance, including feathers. WITHIN, she carries her place of origin, not only as it was when she lived in the landscape, but inclusive of its historic and cultural meaning.
On Friday night, I attended the Third Angle concert of Eve Beglarian’s Mississippi River project. I was born in a river town, and recently explored the Upper Mississippi, so I was eager to hear her work. What I didn’t expect was the degree to which this project, the places along the river, the people she met has come to reside within her. “It definitely changes how you think about the size of this country, the space between towns, the interaction of nature and culture” She noted the difference in perspective arriving in the towns by the river, with the tangible remnants of the 18th and 19th century, instead of by car. She attended local church services on Sunday to get a feel for the different values and attitudes north to south. She has begun to go back to these places to perform the works in the communities that inspired this fusion of text, images, music, sound and rhythm. The mighty Mississippi now flows WITHIN her.
Michael Gamer, works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. But I think he may truly be a time traveler! His focus is Romantic Britain. While to many, that may sound irrelevant, he carries WITHIN, the essence of its everyday society, and imparts on his students the significance this Place and Time, connects to our cultural today. “…an epoch that saw at least four revolutions (American, French, Haitian, and Industrial). A time of renaissance and upheaval, it’s an age essential to understanding our own modernity, one that gave us modern economics and chemistry, democracy and dictatorship, chemistry and the cult of celebrity, science fiction and the secret service.”* You know how it is when someone has just returned from vacation, and they paint all the details, and you feel like you’ve been there? He may not be Dr. Who, but through our conversation, the landscape of Romantic Britain seemed as experientially tangible as the ground we walk on.
In order to succeed as artists or professionals in other disciplines, we must be authentic. To do otherwise minimizes our positive impact to those around us, and the world. For some people, PLACE is a basis for their own culture and authenticity – in so doing, they contribute to ours as well.