Chronotope as a framework for landscape experience analysis

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the analysability of landscape experience and the interpretation enabled by the concept of the chronotope. Beyond its potential for a holistic study of texts, the chronotope can also be applied in landscape studies. In geography, the chronotope has primarily been used for analysis within three different areas: discourses and narratives, spatiotemporal sense of everyday places and biological spaces. Our aim is to show the applicability of the chronotope in the experiential aspect of landscape studies. Experiencing the landscape implies a dialogic understanding of action in a situation including the subject’s interrelationship with the environment. We examine how the subjective experience of an abandoned landscape is internally multiple and has significant value for imagination and meaning-making. The example analysed is an Estonian architect’s description of his visit to Hashima Island, Japan, and focuses on three levels of chronotopes—the topographic, the psychological and the metaphysical.

KEYWORDS:

• Chronotope
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• landscape
• semiotics
• Hashima

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ott Kadarik for sharing his travel experiences and materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Inspired by Asian urban environments, Kadarik has also published a couple of essays and photo essays on urban planning and architecture (see: https://kodarik.com/).

2. Based on the chronotopic analysis, further trajectories of the influence from the Hashima landscape experience could be traced in Kadarik’s later work on the conceptual design of landscapes of ecological urban utopia and dystopia, and on completed architectural and landscape projects of the studio Kadarik Tüür Arhitektid (http://kta.ee/). See also the series ‘Travelogue from the future’ (Komissarov, 2013) in the exhibition ‘Afterlives of Gardens’ at the Kumu Art Museum, in which the panel district Lasnamäe is portrayed as a centre of an agricultural cooperative, the signs of decay on the buildings and the city as abandoned (https://kumu.ekm.ee/en/syndmus/afterlives-of-gardens/).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council [IUT 3-2, IUT2-44, PRG314, PRG398].