Select Views of Luminous Subjects: Palm Trees and the City

Universidade do Porto
Porto, Portugal
2020, November

This work is an essayistic exploration of image-based relationships between nature and city in the context of Climate Change. It burrows through the history of palm trees in Porto to relate how tropical vegetation became a repository of dispairing meanings for the European consciousness during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how that process affected nature/culture and metropole/periphery duologues. Finally, it looks at how the environmental crisis has impacted these duologues using the concept of Landscape Crisis, i.e., the moment when Climate Change is made visible in familiar and dear images.