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Геокультурное пространство Арктики: визуализация ландшафтов и онтологические модели воображения
The geocultural space of any region is formed as a result of the interaction
of two weakly separable elements – geocultures developing in the given territory
and cultural landscapes. The full development of a geocultural space
involves the formation of a unique ontology of imagination, which creates
a cognitive “foundation” for the construction of appropriate models. Ontological
models of imagination characterize the possibilities of an expanded
representation and interpretation of the cultural landscapes of a region. The
visuality of a cultural landscape is a complex formation in which visual reactions
and reflections are the result of multiple imaginations – both personal and
group. The geocultural space of the Arctic, in its visual-discursive dimension,
is complex, since the tradition of the “colonial view”, coupled with the
tendencies to analyze postcolonial practices and to decolonize various Arctic
discourses, creates an ambivalent discursive field of relevant visual practices
and policies. The existential situation of post-exoticism, typologically characteristic
of the Arctic regions, is a field of ontologization of multiple visual practices
that consolidate rhizomatic procedures of geocultural distinctions. As a result
of a field study of the coastal territories of North-Eastern Chukotka, the most
visually intensive key landscape assemblages have been identified: 1) sea
hunting, 2) traditional holidays of sea hunters, 3) “pristine” nature. Landscape
assemblages are represented by various visual dispositives. Visual dispositives
are understood as consistently reproducing and phenomenologically fixed visual
landscape (geocultural) images that characterize the specifics of certain
landscape assemblages. As a result of the study, five key visual dispositives
have been identified that determine the specific forms of the reproduction and
development of both geo-cultures themselves and the corresponding cultural
landscapes of these territories: 1) the dispositive of sea hunters, the most
borderline and fractal; 2) the dispositive of holidays of the traditional culture of
sea hunters; 3) the dispositive of destruction and ruin associated with both the
extreme natural conditions of the region and the era of the Soviet and post-
Soviet development; 4) the dispositive of the “natural”, “pristine” space associated
with the low development of the territory, and 5) the dispositive of multinaturalism,
manifested in the features of the visual environments of Chukchi
settlements (villages, urban-type settlements, small towns). These dispositives,
intertwining and interacting, create multiple, constantly transforming landscape
assemblages. Within the framework of the presented visual dispositives,
the phenomena of Arctic post-exoticism and internal exoticism are formed,
which fix the impossibility of returning to the pre-colonial “landscape optics”.