ABSTRACT
Alexander von Humboldt had a vision of a planetary landscape in which nothing stands alone and nothing is static. Nothing stays put and nothing is spared from immense transformations which fuse and separate islands and continents, transforming islands into continents and continents into islands. Everything is interrelated.
This chapter reflects what Ottmar Ette labels Alexander von Humboldt’s landscapes of theory, born as they are out of the spirit of theory and existing at the intersection of geometry and geography, of art history and visual culture, hiding other landscapes beneath the current apparent landscape while simultaneously indicating new future horizons. For Humboldt, spaces are always spaces of movement: landscapes are full of life and presuppose movement, in the sense of both motion and emotion. They are brought about through an interplay between physical and emotional movement at first, but there are also landscapes that emerge out of Apollonian intelligence and Dionysian passion, landscapes that may still be considered landscapes of theory. These are landscapes of a theory of the world, landscapes of a theory of humankind: landscapes of a life that does not wish to be satisfied with the limitations of the planetary.
