The Vegetal Campaigns

Abstract

“The Vegetal Campaigns” examines how landscapes are made to appear naturalized through both media imagery and dominant paradigms of landscape architectural intervention. Against the apparent inevitability and universality of steady-state and successional ecologies, this thesis advances an “iterative” paradigm—a sequence of interventions that renders landscape as a contingent and continuously changing process. In Ireland, agricultural landscapes have long been naturalized through the ideology of “grass country.” To contest this, the project proposes electoral campaigns whereby political contenders produce images of their visions for Ireland’s landscape future, staged within a new institution in Ireland’s west. These “vegetal campaigns” situate competing ideologies together such that a public electorate may make their choice, either in-situ or through the transmitted media image. As such, the campaigns are both the site of image-making, and the stage for enrolling the public to support and perform these new landscape imaginaries. As media imagery is increasingly produced to advance narrowly defined interests, this thesis questions why landscape architecture has abandoned the image. In the territorial project, our field is uniquely positioned to offer new images of desirable futures—to show that landscape outcomes are not inevitable or universal, but iterative, patchy, open-ended, contingent, discontinuous and continuously becoming.