The Landscape: The Terraqueous Skin of the World

Shobeiri, S.A. (2021)

Article / Letter to editor

The skin is a surface that separates the inside from the outside while belonging to neither of them: it is a sheer instance of liminality where in the impervious borders of things are turned into the porous boundaries of beings. The landscape, the skin of the world, is such a leaky boundary, which imbricates and implicates with terrestrial organisms while exceeding any organicity. By examining the recent photograph taken by contemporary Dutch artist Roosmarijn Pallandt (fig.1), this paper reads her representation of the landscape as the terraqueous skin of the world: an organelles organ that conduces the possibility of haptic perception through photography. To do this, it first draws on Tim Ingold’s theory of “surface vision” and then employs Edward S. Casey’s method of “liminology” to eventually apperceive the skin of the landscape as what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “a being-to-itself insofar as it is from side to side outside itself.”

• Landscape
• Skin
• Boundary
• Liminal
• Haptic perception

• All authors: Shobeiri, S.A.
• Date: 2021-10-10
• Journal: Membrana
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 41 - 51
• DOI: doi:10.47659/mj-v6n2id117
• Link: https://www.journals.membrana.org/index.php/membrana/article/view/Shobei...