Somewhere between art and design lies visual communication. The practices of graphic design, communication design, information design, media arts, advertising all have a place in visual communication but there is another practice called chorographia that advocates for sustainment by creating and engaging in an experience of the aesthetics of place. Drawing, painting, photography, cartography, mapping, diagramming, tracing are all ways of representing landscape. The aesthetic of place in this project Drawing Country is understood as a connection between knowledge, experience and people.
Erwin Straus (1891-1975), a phenomenologist and neurologist of European origin, helped to pioneer anthropological medicine and psychiatry, a holistic approach to medicine that is critical of mechanistic and reductionistic approaches to understanding and treating human beings.
In 1967 speaking at Aisthesis and Aesthetics the Fourth Lexington Conference on Phenomenology: Pure and Applied and quoted in the conference proceedings:-
Referring to my house or my gloves or my country or my university, to my friends or my enemies, if any, I am referring to a kind of partnership between house and owner, father and son, country and citizens. It seems that there is but one exception: only in reference to my body there is no partner – at least so it appears. Indeed there is a partner, nothing remote or concealed: just the opposite. The partner is a commonplace in the literal sense of the word. For my partner – and the partner of each one of you – is the Earth, which may well be spelled here with a capital E. In our primary experience, unaffected by the teachings of Copernicus and modern astronomy, the Earth is the timeless ground, resting in its apparently effortless power. This certainly is a formidable partner! (pg 139)
placetracing | Jacqueline Gothe 