El paisaje como imagen afectiva

On his way to a political philosophy founded not on how we would like things to be, but on how they are, the philosopher Spinoza had to take a step back and develop an ethics that presented affects as properties of bodies. From there, and in order to determine the nature and strength of affects, he had to go a step further and develop a physics that allowed him to understand the functioning of bodies, the conditions of their encounters and the intensity of their exchanges. This path that links politics, ethics and physics around the power of bodies and their affects helps us to think in an operational way about minor practices based on bodies and their common architectural and political power. In particular, we focus on the notion of "affective image", which allows us to move from the painting we find at the beginning of so many histories of landscape to the earlier definition of landschaft where it operates as a form of commonality produced in the assemblage of shared practices, uses and rights in synchrony with the dynamism of a territory. Understanding landscape as an affective image capable of touching and modulating individual and collective bodies, and knowing how this image is materially constructed, allows us not only to conceptually construct landscape as that common assemblage between nature, material practices and cultural meanings, but to open the door to new instruments and methods capable of making this affective image operative within our architectural practice.