Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Catherine Mosbach, “Landscape on Trial”

“Landscape on Trial” will develop main concerns about landscape shapes.
The movement of understanding—tactile, tentative, anxious—leads us to an exploration of the sedimentation of forms in an experimental mode.
The images that we are proposing here is more of the nature of image as material, a neither-here-nor-there, between fabrications that precede it and processes that extend beyond it.
Their visibility requires that the interwoven layers of several time-spans be shown: the short-span of production which threads and commands the taking of form; the long-span of accumulation which transforms everything even as it perpetrates its memory.
Working on the form of a space means working on the issues that run through it, it means opening up the critical space needed to evaluate them.
The work of configuration consists in putting this difference in place, not in presenting it as yet another ‘object’ (an anecdote), but on the contrary arranging it around us, more effectively configuring it so that it has an impact on us…and open up new horizons.
Le mouvement de comprendre conduit—de façon tactile, tâtonnante, inquiète—à explorer la sédimentation des formes en mode expérimental.
Les images que nous proposons en débat relèvent plutôt d’un matériau image, un entre deux entre fabrications qui les précèdent et processus qui les devancent.
Accéder à leur lisibilité ne peut faire l’impasse de plusieurs temps à l’œuvre : le temps court de la production qui file et qui engage la prise de forme, le temps long de l’accumulation qui transforme tout en en conservant la mémoire.
Travailler la forme en paysage c’est travailler les questions qui le traversent, c’est ouvrir la critique nécessaire à leur évaluation. Ces formes à l’œuvre provoquent la différence et non la ressemblance. Le travail de mise en forme est de composer cette différence, de l’installer entre nous, de la disposer afin qu’elle nous provoque et nous ouvre à d’autres horizons.


Mosbach Paysagistes, represented by Catherine Mosbach, is endowed with several experiences involving projects at a large scale, from sensitive sites to sites of strong patrimonial value.  These interventions received several national awards :  the award Espace Public du Moniteur (Public Space of Moniteur), le Trophée du Paysage du Ministère de l’environnement (the trophee of landscape of the Ministry of the environment), and Rosa Barba ex æquo (European Landscape award for Bordeaux’s Botanical Garden). This competence was developed at different scales of intervention in landscape and programatic stakes and especially about large, magnetic sites.

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