land around

Complementary to Montagna’s photography, the mapping process works with the more invisible aspects of the landscapes photographed.
These patterns are typically hidden from the human perception; and this is not only because such patterns are not visually accessible, but also because their temporal pattern does not follow anthropocentric ones.

Three types of vegetation corresponding to three different heights are represented: grasslands, shrub lands, and more ecologically established areas populated by trees. Referring to the ecological succession diagram, they correspond to three different temporal patterns. The different vegetation also corresponds to different antrophic environments that the bulls figure generate; their influence on the surrounding.
From these drawings, other conditions of urbanity can be extracted as well; in this way thinking of the urban through landscape.

Representation of landscape in the photography of Maurizio Montagna
for the book ‘Toros - The Making of a Territory’
Role: Maps and Infographics
Published by Artphilein Editions, Lugano, 2022

Photographs: Maurizio Montagna
Editor: Elisa C. Cattaneo
Texts: Ethel Baraona Pohl, Elisa C. Cattaneo

www.artphilein-editions.org/2022/05/11/maurizio-montagna-toros/

Visualisation of Montagna’s journey; showing photographed locations per trip, length of trip, distance between locations, and time between trips.

The unmistakable silhouette of the Osborne bull is so deeply rooted in our minds, it has become a vernacular object in photography: widely used in art and cinema, due to its widespread recognizability and the powerful image it evokes, they could be considered one of the most potent images of the recent decade.

In Montagna’s photographies, the big Osborne signs an articulate and controversial dialogue with the surrounding areas. They become a means to describe the landscape, opening a diatribe with the social and natural environment and revealing the role of images as interference between public/and private, power/perception, politics and people.
Montagna’s images unveil the mechanisms of forming a disputable meaning in the landscape.