Emancipated Spectator (Ranciere)

Jacques Rancière’s book The Emancipated Spectator challenges the old idea that audiences are passive and must be “taught” how to see. For him, every spectator is already active, already interpreting, already capable of making meaning. This breaks the hierarchy between the artist as master and the audience as pupil. The spectator does not need instruction but space—room to connect, to imagine, to build her own links. To over-explain or over-narrate is to mistrust the spectator’s intelligence, to close down what could remain open. This can mean resisting the urge to deliver fixed stories or polished images. By obscuring narratives into a low-resolution state, the landscape is left ambiguous, open to interpretation. The visitor, already emancipated, explores and reads on their own terms, finding meaning in estrangement, silence, or fragment.

/ Alexandre Champagne

Today, the possibility arises to define a new design approach to address issues of environmental and social justice in the urban context. Based on an integrated understanding of the interdependencies involving human and environmental relations, the applied-philosophy approach for landscape architectural practices induces a paradigm shift in spatial design. Rather than applying downstream solutions to […]

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