Sirmilik, geographical experience, and the question of landscape

Traditional landscape aesthetics, featured in geography and the fine arts, privilege a form of distance firmly attached to the gaze of the European colonial. This conceptualization of space has been strongly criticized and has recently been overshadowed in academia by an emphasis on a multisensory f...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wilson, Samantha
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/130308
Description
Summary:Traditional landscape aesthetics, featured in geography and the fine arts, privilege a form of distance firmly attached to the gaze of the European colonial. This conceptualization of space has been strongly criticized and has recently been overshadowed in academia by an emphasis on a multisensory form of embodied experience. In contrast to this shift of emphasis, Martin Heidegger placed traditional structures of contemplation alongside an embodied process when accounting for our relationship to landscape and space. Zacharias Kunuk emphasizes this problematization from the indigenous point of view in his latest short film, Sirmilik (2011). In the film he challenges the notion that one form of experience can be separated from the other when considering the arctic landscape.