Transitus Naturalis

"Transitus Naturalis" is a photobook exploring landscape transformations over time, revealing its shift to landscaping and links to history, culture, and power through postcards, stamps, and authorial photos.

Presentation of the Photobook "Transitus Naturalis" : "Transitus Naturalis" is a work that is established as an artistic, historical and critical testimony, challenging the traditional understanding of the landscape and landscaping. The result of a deep and interdisciplinary research by Elaine Pessoa, the photobook explores the intricate relations between botany, history, art and cultural memory, proposing a rereading of the landscape as something in transit, dynamic and constantly changing. Throughout its pages, the work deconstructs the idea of fixed landscapes, illuminating the forced displacements that shaped the Brazilian imagination from the colonial period to the present day. Through a varied and expressive collection - which brings together postcards, stamps and authorial photographs - Elaine Pessoa rescues a historical narrative that reveals both colonial exploration and the domestication of nature. The symbolic use of visual elements, such as gold, simultaneously evokes the splendor of natural riches and the scars of predatory exploitation. The photo book not only documents, but also questions. He leads the reader through a reflective path, in which the landscape emerges as a cultural and political construction, marked by displacements between continents, biomes and historical times. In this process, "Transitus Naturalis" goes beyond the landscape in its natural state, exploring its transition to landscaping: a field where nature is reinterpreted, organized and domesticated. Botanical gardens, urban squares and landscaping projects are presented as spaces of appropriation and reinvention, where native and exotic species coexist in a precarious balance. This transition from landscape to landscaping reflects the historical efforts of domestication and control of nature, from the first botanical gardens of the 19th century in Brazil to the large European greenhouses that served for research and acclimatization of species. The work also investigates how these spaces encapsulate narratives of power and control, transforming biodiversity into scientific and aesthetic heritage. With an investigative and experimental approach, "Transitus Naturalis" offers a visual constellation that connects history, art, anthropology and economics. The images and texts do not follow a linear chronology, but build paths and synapses that reveal flows, extensions and intersections between the past and the present, between nature and culture. This photo book is an invitation to reflection and action. Between beauty and destruction, fascination and exploration, Elaine Pessoa challenges us to reconsider our role as inhabitants of an ecosystem that is both rich and vulnerable. In "Transitus Naturalis", the landscape - whether in its natural form or translated into landscaping - emerges as a powerful voice, offering lessons of memory, transformation and regeneration in times of profound change.

https://vimeo.com/1047550599