APAP Portugal marked the 4th CoE International Landscape Day - 20 October 2021!
A story that is written and inscribed in everything around us and in the deepest part of us. Often without knowing it, without realizing it.
It has ecological, historical, social, cultural and sentimental dimensions and meanings.
The landscape we see today is just a moment in this history, captured between everything that preceded it and everything that will come after. It is a continuous process, which records, in each place, the marks of the passage of the people who live it.
What we preserve, what we destroy, what we mold, what we cultivate, what we sow, what we slaughter, what we dirty, what we build, what we transform in the construction of what we call life.
And because it is precisely a living and permanent record of the balances, or lack thereof, between Man and Environment and the way they adjust, or misadjust, over time, it is a heritage composed of positive and negative aspects that we must honor equally way, using both for proper learning.
This October 20, 2021, the 4th International Landscape Day is commemorated, an initiative of the Council of Europe aimed at celebrating the landscape precisely with the spatial expression of the diversity of our natural and cultural heritage and heritage, constituting a fundamental pillar of our identity. This date also marks, and not by chance, the 21st anniversary of the elaboration of the European Landscape Convention in Florence, a document that Portugal signed immediately, but only ratified in 2005.
It is also not by chance that this date coincides in Portugal with a particularly decisive moment for the future of our landscapes, with the APAP starting the 80/100 initiative. Eighty years of teaching Landscape Architecture and a century after the birth of Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles.
In a historical moment when the debate around the landscape has become the order of the day, every look at the approach to landscape architecture carried out and produced by us, introduces an added value on a reality that must pass to the exterior with due sense of its responsibilities and scope. In this way, throughout this year that will mediate between the 20th of October 2021 and 2022 - on the 11th of November, on the 3rd of March, during April, on the 25th of May and on other occasions - we
will exhibit, we will meet, we will visit , we will edit, we will release, we will confer, we will form and we will honor. Because the landscape also lives on citizenship and draws with it.
The landscape, after all, is us..
