Ruines et paysages bruts. Sur l'art involontaire.

We will try to undo the ideology of the “raw” in landscape analyses - the fantasy of what may have been little or not damaged by industrial activities and other traces of man. The landscape architect Gilles Clément shows that environments always resist both their exploitation and their preservation. They are dynamic and inventive; we must deal with their specific qualities. We will consider what Clément calls the “Third landscape”, a concept that applies to urban wastelands and derelict areas where activity seems suspended or suppressed, but which clearly become refuges of biodiversity, due to the absence of maintenance. The Third landscape and its industrial ruins allow for a reinvented relationship to the landscape, a “non-aesthetic” relationship, which would include “involuntary art”, a situational art that does not exactly take the forms of the wild or the raw, but integrates the random and the artificial. As a final note, we would also like to mention Josef Koudelka's photographs, that invite us to revisit the conventions of ruin aesthetics from this angle - Koudelka practices an art that acknowledges the complexity of its object, an object that is damaged, morbid, involuntary and yet majestic.