Translating the landscape ...

Translation as it applies to the non-literary arts. Eliot Anderson's gesture of superimposing tourist shots of landscape seems to be addressing the notion of identity of a site. That is, in textual translation, one of the things Walter Benjamin assumes is that the source text will somewhat remain the same (even though our reading of it remains the same), but that the act of translation would provide new ways of engaging it. But what of the landscape, which changes with erosion, occupation, desertion and so on? How does his installation project, his"weeding in," opens up the possibilities of engagement with a place, the possibilities of an afterlife for the site?

Anderson also stated that his work aimed at deconstructing an urban discourse as it tries to (maybe?) distance itself from an American discourse that looks for a "middle ground between the wild and the uncultured." Later, that "nature was a construct" was asserted. If we take this statement to his fullest, do we arrive to Tschumi's assertion that all "architecture [all occupation of space] is urban"? Then, would a translation of landscape be architectural?

One notion that seemed to be missing from Anderson's presentation, but was approached briefly in discussion with Amy Trachtenberg, the notion of Otherness. And the notion of event, that makes the landscape and the other exceptional, provides them with an aura.