We often think of the landscape as something static or slowly changing, endowed with a sense of stability that is only disrupted in moments of crisis, such as natural or human disasters. Therefore, it is common for our understanding of the landscape, which is developed and expressed through both actual experience and representations, to refer to a static topography, leading us to find security in the stable spatial context generated also by the unchanging landscapes of our thoughts and memories. Furthermore, we often rely on maps and other visual references, which we assume present an accurate and still representation of the world around us. In this context, iconic geological features such as mountains are usually considered to be stable, unmovable elements, landmarks that are enhanced by their emblematic presence in the topography and their often rough materiality, which allow for a number of both cultural and historical axis mundi connotations to be attributed to them.
In spite of our ‘accurate’ representations of the world around us and the assumed stability of geological features such as mountains, however, it is not rare for us to lose track of where we are and how our position relates to different directions, features of the landscape and other entities. Our so-called accurate models, which are based on a stable Cartesian understanding of space, lack the experiential qualities of a topography, which are bodily inhabited by humans and therefore ever-changing in terms of how people relate to and understand them. This Cartesian and objective representational approach to geography opposes the non-representational understanding of landscape, which was initially proposed by Nigel Thrift in the 1990s (Thrift 1996) and then further developed by numerous scholars such as J. D. Dewsbury and Derek McCormack (Dewsbury 2000; McCormack 2005). Such non-representational models embrace experiential spatiality and suggest how it can be used to explore a range of new geographical understandings and possibilities. Practice and performativity open fields of investigation in which embodied movement plays an important role as the landscape continually changes depending on our movement through and experience with it.
This tension between us and the landscape is a significant strain that cannot only be grasped visually and abstractly. As such, representational and non-representational approaches to geography are intertwined in this book in order to more holistically evaluate the friction between the individual and their environs, suggesting the importance of mountainous topographies within the realms of human experience and the humanities.
As human geographer John Wylie argues, the landscape emerges in the tension between an objective and a subjective understanding of the world. Indeed, for Wylie, the landscape is a tension between the perceiver and the perceived. It is the reality shared between a moving individual and the context that he/she moves through. Within this framework, landscape becomes a phenomenological situation rather than a static image or background. The landscape is something living and changing through the perception of the individual; it is the tension between an object being experienced and the subject experiencing the object through his/her senses. This multi-sensory condition is experienced to a great extent (and almost to its limits) in the case of the mountains that from distant, emblematic natural elements become the foldings of the earth’s skin as perceived by the mountaineer climbing up to them, the thinker that imagines them, the reader that interprets them, the artist or the architect that depicts them.
Emphasising such a non-static understanding of natural elements, which varies depending on how we inhabit and represent them, the authors of this volume seek to answer questions about the moving characteristics of mountains. Are mountains moving entities? How do we move through mountains? Can we move mountains? How can we depict a moving mountain? These diverse and complex questions call for an interdisciplinary exploration of movement via experiential, representational as well as hermeneutical approaches.
Furthermore, the tensions that Wylie attributes to landscape, and this understanding of mountains as key moments of a topography, raise other questions that the chapters of this book seek to unfold: With what kind of tensions are we dealing? How can we define these tensions in the exploration of a physical element that has been thought as relatively static, emblematic and aesthetically imposing? What are the different approaches to such tensions?
Through examinations of different areas of cultural landscapes and mountain studies, from mapping to practical experience, the authors of this volume explore the different tensions found between mountainous landscapes and agents of interpretation. Concepts of performance, practice and mobility are deployed in order to demonstrate and explain the non-static nature of mountains, as realised through inhabitation, interpretation and communication.
Several areas of academic discourse have begun to explore these themes more specifically. In particular, associations between performativity and different theatrical actions such as writing a play, working on its scenography, rehearsing and executing it have served as a common ground for scholars as a means of unfolding the dynamics of landscape through non-representational methods. Underlining the significance of the connection between performance and theatricality, even as a way of understanding of everyday life, Carlson argues: ‘with performance as a kind of critical wedge, the metaphor of theatricality has moved out of the arts into almost every aspect of modern attempts to understand our condition and activities, into every branch of human sciences […] performativity and theatricality have developed in these fields, both as metaphors and as analytic tools’ (Carlson 1996, 6). Challenging traditional theatrical praxis through interdisciplinary and intercultural comparisons, moreover, Richard Schechner also highlights the performative interconnection between theatre and real life. The notions of the ‘presentation self’, ‘restored behaviour’ and ‘expressive culture’ underpin his ideas, making way for interpretations of both theatre and role-playing in real life, which are based on transformations happening from culture to culture and from historical period to historical period (Schechner 1985, 35–116).
For Schechner, theatrical performance has the ability to transform the performer through the narrative of its production, something that can be so powerful that it is also transformative for the audience. Building upon Schechner’s arguments and focusing on the narrative aspects of theatre, Jonathan Pitches explores in his chapter the performative dynamics which are inherent to the narration and re-tellings of ‘dark play’ as related to three different mountains: Mont Blanc, the Eiger and the Matterhorn. Covering a wide span of time, from 1852 to 2014, Pitches examines the tension found in dangerous performances which require risky movements through the spaces of these mountains, as viewed and recorded through telescopes and headcams.
Following a similar track, the connection between performativity and religious topography has been greatly explored by numerous scholars. Repetitively conducting symbolic actions, rituals are believed to be performative ways for people to contact the ‘sacred’ (Baker 2010, 41). Religious topographies (including both the architecture and the natural landscape of a site) become the spaces in which a number of built, unbuilt and human components are harmoniously combined according to the employment of ritual practices. The body-subject is always in a dialectical relationship with its context, inscribing ritual performances in place and becoming both author and reader at the same time.
Rituals have their own spatial and temporal characteristics that communicate diverse messages in a multi-sensory way. Meaningfully performing a given act or idea, the individual participates in a ritual praxis, constantly moving between individual and collective levels of embodied interpretation. Therefore, in his chapter, Christos Kakalis explains how Mount Athos becomes a space for silent prayer and ritual actions to take place. The Athonite landscape emerges through the reciprocal interrelation between silence and communal ritual, stasis and movement. By examining the interpretation of both the ascetics and the visitors, Kakalis explores a mountainous religious topography as a place of religious movements and pauses, an eventual spatiality also expressed in his experiential visualisations, to echo Wylie’s argument:
I think space still speaks of emptiness, absence, interval. The stillness and silence of juxtaposition. Place, by contrast, and even despite all the attempts to think of it differently, relationally, globally, is always already too full, too full of itself and the others: a whole congregation; everybody present. But I think that landscape works precisely amidst and through both of them: presence/absence. Landscape sits precisely on this tipping-point, both joining and dividing. It tears things apart, and maybe even sometimes threads them together again. (Wylie et al. 2008, 203)
Expanding on Wylie’s aforementioned theme of place, Emily Goetsch examines the tension between the compromised circumstances of Iberian Christian communities who migrated to Christian strongholds in the mountainous, northern regions of the peninsula during Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula and their fundamental belief in salvation and triumph. Through close examination of medieval Iberian cartography, namely the Beatus Mappaemundi, and relevant textual material, the author argues that the mountainous landscape was used by medieval Iberian Christians as a way of resolving or rationalising the tensions between the political, social and religious uncertainty they experienced and the salvational context of Christian ideology. By unpacking cartographic iconography and texts from the period, Goetsch argues for the performative transposition of historical and biblical narratives on ascetic triumphs in the mountains, citing the City on a Hill (Jerusalem) as a prototype for the behaviours and considerations of those communities.
Goetsch’s discussion of cartographic features extends from earlier literature on the ways in which maps are structured in relation to particular kinds of historically situated interests (power, legal title, symbolic claims, etc.). Since the late 1980s an important shift has taken place within studies of cartography and we have become acutely aware of the contingent nature of data and the partiality of all kinds of maps and the codes they use to communicate the elements of a territory. Cartographers such as J.B. Harley, J. Corner, J. Crampton and J. Pickles have led the academic discourse on the topic, which aims to redefine the philosophical and practical approaches to cartography. Considering the importance of performativity and embodiment, they argue for the role of maps as agents of an ‘eventful’ world, the creation of which is an unfinished process, remaining always open to further interpretations (Harley 1992, 1–20).
Maria Mitsoula’s chapter also challenges traditional cartographic methods and their role in design process. The depiction of topography is mainly connected to cartography which represents the earth’s relief through schematic models such as hutching, contour lines and physiography. Mapping is recognised to be on the boundary between conventional encoding of spatiality and the meaningful embodied topography, concepts which have played a key role in architecture since the 1980s, with architects using mapping as a generative tool in architectural design (Dorrian 2005, 61–72). Challenging these ideas, Mitsoula’s chapter explores the dialogue between the architecture of Athens and Mount Pentelikon through the agency of marble, also suggesting new ways of representing the space graphically so as to indicate the critical roles that movement and performativity play in the landscape. Dynamically responding to non-representational theories, this approach echoes the Deleuzian tension between possibilities and virtualities that suggests multiplicities in time and space that are ready to be grasped in actual experience and interpreted in mapping explorations.
In addition to the ways in which performativity facilitates an understanding of the significance of mountains and the ways in which people move through and according to them, different interpretations of mountains in diverse cultural, historical, social and disciplinary contexts also open new perspectives in their understanding with regards to the ways in which mountains can change and shift. They describe events when the individual (artist, author, missionary, mountaineer) begs questions of the topography through his/her experience, while simultaneously being asked different questions by the topography. As is suggested by German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, this exchange of queries and challenges creates a discourse of changing perspectives (Gadamer 1989, 301). In this sense, historical, social and cultural redefinitions of geography have influenced the construction of mountaineer’s identity as it has been the subject of discourse for more than 20 years now, something examined in Bernard Debarbieux’s chapter. Imagination plays an important role in t...