Art Exhibition at the Forum: Landscapes of Care
OPEN CALL – LANDSCAPES OF CARE
Regeneration, Memory, Co-existence
Curator: dr. Dominika Gołębiewska, landscape architect
We warmly invite artists, designers, researchers, and interdisciplinary practitioners to participate in the open call for the international exhibition:
LANDSCAPES OF CARE. Regeneration, Memory, Co-existence
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The exhibition accompanies the Landscape Forum in Guimarães and will take place in the prestigious venues of IDEGUI Guimarães and District C (next to the city center).
This is the next edition of the exhibition cycle accompanying the Landscape Forum.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition Landscapes of Care. Regeneration, Memory, Co-existence accompanies the 15th LE:NOTRE Landscape Forum 2026 in Guimarães, the European Green Capital, and offers an artistic and research-based reflection on landscape as a space of care, regeneration, and shared responsibility.
Set within the context of Guimarães’ ambition to become a Net Zero and One Planet City, the exhibition explores landscape beyond its functional or infrastructural dimensions. It approaches landscape as a living, relational system shaped by ecological processes, cultural memory, everyday practices, and forms of coexistence between human and more-than-human actors. In this sense, the exhibition resonates strongly with the Forum’s focus on green and blue infrastructure, the Costa-Couros river corridor, and the regenerative potential of Bairro C.
The presented works emerge at the intersection of artistic research, landscape architecture, environmental humanities, and therapeutic landscape practices. Through graphic art, experimental printmaking, drawing, mapping, and symbolic visual languages, the exhibition investigates how landscapes remember—how they store traces of industrial histories, social transformations, natural cycles, and often invisible ecological flows.
Particular attention is given to everyday landscapes: cities, streets, squares, and parks—spaces we pass through daily and in which we spend most of our lives. These ordinary environments are approached as places capable of supporting well-being, grounding, and regeneration, functioning as therapeutic landscapes embedded in everyday experience. The exhibition emphasizes that such spaces do not merely serve us functionally; they actively participate in shaping our physical and emotional states, offering forms of care that often remain unnoticed.
At the core of the exhibition lies the concept of care understood as a landscape practice. Care is approached here as an active, embodied, and relational process: care for soil, water, biodiversity, cultural continuity, and community life. The exhibition builds on the assumption that the relationship between people and landscape is reciprocal and processual. Landscape is not merely a resource or a passive background for human activity, but an active participant in life itself—a structure that sustains, regulates, and co-creates the conditions of human existence. Water, soil, vegetation, microclimate, and natural rhythms continuously care for us, even when this care remains invisible or taken for granted.
This perspective resonates with the thinking of Anna Tsing, who emphasizes that regeneration does not occur through control, optimization, or complete design, but through maintaining the conditions that allow life to continue in its complex and fragile forms. As Tsing observes, life emerges through precarious collaborations and interdependencies rather than harmony or mastery. Regeneration is therefore understood not as a return to an ideal state, nor as a rapid technical fix, but as a long-term relational process grounded in attention, coexistence, and mutual responsiveness.
Care thus unfolds in two inseparable directions. On the one hand, landscape cares for people by offering spaces of biological support, regeneration, continuity, and everyday stability. On the other hand, caring for landscape means taking responsibility for the conditions of its endurance: for water, soil, biodiversity, the memory of place, and the lives of its more-than-human inhabitants. These dimensions cannot be separated—care for landscape remains intrinsically connected to care for one another and for ourselves, including the rhythms of the body, the need for regeneration, and the capacity to remain attentive and responsive.
A complementary perspective can be found in the relational thinking of Donna Haraway, who calls for learning how to live responsibly within shared, more-than-human worlds shaped by mutual dependence. From this viewpoint, care is not a sentimental gesture, but a situated practice of presence, accountability, and co-inhabitation.
In dialogue with the Council of Europe Landscape Convention and the New European Bauhaus, the exhibition emphasizes landscape as a democratic space and a medium through which ecological awareness, social inclusion, and spatial justice can be cultivated. Artistic practices function here as tools of perception and interpretation, making visible hidden connections: buried rivers, subtle ecological processes, everyday spatial practices, and networks of care embedded in the urban landscape.
Landscapes of Care complements the student competition and the broader discourse of the LE:NOTRE Landscape Forum by adding a reflective and sensorial layer. It positions art not as an illustration of planning concepts, but as a form of landscape knowledge in its own right—capable of bridging scientific analysis, spatial practice, and lived experience. The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider landscape as a space not only to be designed or managed, but also to be cared for, remembered, and co-inhabited.