The documentary exhibition that opens the second Biennial of the Canary Islands attempts to analyse the successive intents and interventions that have shaped the archipelago’s landscape at different levels of the territory, making sure to include those lyrical proposals that savour the essence of the landscape from other perspectives. Architects, landscapists, geographers, engineers, artists, writers, philosophers: all have enriched a complex narrative that raises several issues about a concept that is hard to define. The term landscape is used and theorised on by specialists that formulate different interpretations and questions. Questions that we will only be able to resolve with their profound analysis and the fruits of the investigations of all the professionals mentioned above.

The documentary work that we present attempts to visualise the interventions carried out on the shore, in the cities, in the suburbs and in rural areas. A set of maps, drawings, photographic materials, models, and field notebooks will be used to show the active scenarios of a territory that had not been sufficiently documented. The aim is to start a process that will be completed through several editions that will gradually incorporate the contributions of professionals from different fields.

In this edition we have engaged two teams of architects. They will guide our gaze through different projects that synthesise some of the most interesting proposals carried out in the Islands at the end of the past century and in the present 21st century. José Luis Gago Vaquero and Amigó, Machado y Arricivita Architects curate two large exhibitions. One held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria titled De la sima a la cumbre. De la naturaleza a la protección del paisaje (From Pit to Peak. From Nature to Landscape Conservation). The other one, located in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, is called Territorios del paisaje (Territories of the Landscape). Two projects that delve in similar issues that will help illuminate a matter of utmost importance.

The Biennial of the Canary Islands is a suitable arena to initiate such a task, particularly given the broad reach it has in the general public and in landscape debate forums. The objective is to bring several projects into the exhibition room so that the public becomes aware of their contributions. They have to be reviewed because they are still valid and could facilitate the understanding on the way in which the landscape has to be intervened so that we do not have to renounce the conservation of our territory. On the other hand, the way in which this information is conveyed also matters, the way in which the contributions of these documents are presented to the public. To attend to this point, the Biennial has engaged highly qualified specialists. To go back on these archived projects, to review them anew, to contemplate them with curiosity, to formulate new questions, can also help us better understand what we ought to do and where we have erred in the past.