SENSORY LANDSCAPES | living-labs | Valencia

Magro River
Valencia, Spain
Artistic production in educational environments

The agricultural landscape of the River Magro, located in the Mediterranean lands of Valencia, a territory where citrus fruits and community gardens are cultivated, has provided an excellent context for developing a series of landscape approaches and site-interventions that promote new dialogues in relation to the contemporary challenges that our discipline is facing nowadays.

Through the educational and participatory process, the project aims to sensitize, raise awareness and build consensus on ecological values as interpretive links that communicate unique experiences of the local environment.

With this perspective and based on the open vision of the new generations, the living labs propose a ludic and didactic framework that promotes new ways of coexistence between natural and human environments. A series of landscape experiences focused on the connection between nature-based knowledge and complementary concepts, such as ecology, landscaping, biology, phenomenology, agriculture and environmental art.

The project proposes a multi-layered approach as a conductive thread that links different experiences: textures, scents, sounds, tastes and scenes.

  • Soundscapes: The sonic environment and the symphony of landscapes.
  • Landscapes of taste: productive landscapes, agricultures and gastronomic landscapes.
  • Scentscapes + cultural smellscapes: The sense of smell as an evocative connection associated with place, memory and experience.
  • Tactile landscapes: haptic and tactile perceptions. The experience of touching nature and feeling temperatures.
  • Visual landscapes: scenery and time. The visual perception (micro + macro), scenarios and the cyclic sense of time and nature.

The environmental activities have been complemented with the research-labs, spaces of knowledge, art production and dissemination that have been materialized into a series of exhibition spaces where children generate their own architectures and content. Spatial devices where the experiential site work and the landscape experience have been processed and displayed. Through the participatory process the kids explore the use of low-impact and natural materials that respond to the unique characteristics of the site. They also explore the use of nature -wind, sound, lights, shades, aromas, textures – from the unique local environment. Sound pieces generated by the wind, orchards from local seeds, aromatic devices from collected herbs, visual herbariums and narratives, tactile seed drawings and leaves reliefs.

credits:

x-studio : : Ivan Juarez

Artistic Resistance Educational Project.
With the support of Consortium Museums Generalitat Valenciana- Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporàni.

Real Valencia School:

Director: Vicent Lozano
Coordinator: Luis Sanjaime
Teacher 4th Grade: Fina Gonzalvo
Teacher 5th Grade: Noelia Díaz