Symbiotic Matorral: Becoming-Animal and Other Explorations of the Cognitive Landscape

The book construes a retroactive frame of consciousness for the Symbiotic Matorral academic research project directed by Pasini at the Universidad de Monterrey that led to the installation of a landscape route through the 'matorral submontano' of the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico. An interpretative analysis of the landscape, bound to disciplinary criteria, and the consequent spatial reformation proceeds in mutual exchange with collateral participated experiences. The latter engage the fields of land art, performance art, and the promotion of environmental awareness among young generations by involving, in different phases, local groups of independent artists, activists, and primary school pupils. The engagement with the ecosystem of the matorral, a prevalently arbustive ecosystem with a high degree of biodiversity extended over the local lower mountainsides, starts with speculations on possible retro-innovative alternatives to dominant metro-urban lifestyles. This interest calls for a cognitive exploration of the landscape that leads to the understanding of the basic ecological processes, the risks that threaten their persistence, and the possible compatibility of human presence. A parallel geo-philosophical exploration of the place, its natural heritage and scant while penetrative encroachments of anthropic erosion, leads instead to a reinvention of the landscape apparatus to be spatially transcribed in-situ. The spatial transcription takes the form of a multilayered landscape route offering a flora-and-fauna itinerary to discover the ecosystem as well as the implantation of a novel cultural narrative contributing to identitarian consolidation and leading to an alternative understanding of contemporary landscapes. The traits of art, activism, and scientific work that have been layering through multiple collateral experiences are recomposed in a single textual and visual narrative.