Scenes and Scenarios, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, organises a tour through a variety of spaces created to satisfy the demands of a population obsessed with leisure. Thus, it tackles the consumption of landscape as a perceived range of experiences from the landscapes and scenarios of enjoyment. It makes use of silence, not as the absence of words, but as the preamble to a series of questions. Silence as a shield allowing a reflection on what transpires outside, to analyse the use and enjoyment of the spaces we produce, so as to interpret the new spatial reality in its different levels and stages. The point is to penetrate a near dimension, configured by cultural variables that are shaped by behaviours closely related to the culture of the image.

Scenes and Scenarios raises questions about the mechanisms that make the landscape a rising cultural product, and leisure the driving force of its economy. The city with its parks, its gardens, its squares, its streets, or its parasites. The beach, the woods, the mountain, the rivers. Settings that are part of a cultural imaginary carved out by history. The sites of pleasure and relaxation for a society that needs to constantly renew the activities carried out in its leisure spaces. Settings that give meaning to our actions.

The city becomes an essential platform for the analysis of social practises, but also for the elaboration of proposals for social change. The urban space as a laboratory and observatory of a territory that facilitates new experiences. The growing impact of human behaviours and lifestyles has resulted in morphological and structural changes in the new habitat. The use and enjoyment of the public space, of the settings where our actions take place, but which also provides the framework for communication and exchange. We recognise the cities for their scenarios, understood as a constitutive part of the private and collective imaginary of an environment that diverges from the natural to enter the space of the creative imagination of the form and the fulfilment of our desires, and whose primary manifestation is none other than consumption. A consumption of which the urban space itself is object and expression.

In the woods we find the echoes of romanticism. Walking down a sheltered path, the scarcity of human presence, the solitude, the pleasure in the process of walking, the reencounter with the “sublime”, with the notions of beauty and of the journey, all add excitement to the enjoyment of the unique surroundings. The encounter with the “most natural” nature that we possess conforms a landscape marked by gilded letters in our imaginary. At the other extreme is the beach, or the swimming pools of the holiday season. Invaded by sun umbrellas, towels and sprawled flesh in the summer months. The racket of the crowd mingles with the noise of the continuous crashing of the waves. The beach generates an aesthetics that conditions the very development of human settlings around it. The craving for sun, for bathing, for seascapes, and the creation of spaces that fuel desire, the encounter and flirtation of semi-naked bodies, makes this setting a paradigm of the new dimension acquired by the enjoyment of the collective space.

The identity of each individual depends on a series of encounters and dis-encounters that keep emerging at different times under different circumstances. Certain scenarios are used to establish approximations to the current modes of inhabiting. An inhabiting that needs to be interpreted from a multicultural perspective with the aim of capturing the experiences and perceptions fostered by a territory in constant flux.