Transporting nature: Landscape in icelandic urban culture

In this chapter landscape has traditionally been seen as an aesthetic subject in which natural scenery is represented in order to reflect, literally or metaphorically, a range of human needs. Landscape on the other hand is something that is cultivated by man but occupied by all living beings including human and non-human animals. Simon Schama has proposed wilderness, which is often understood as an area of uncultivated land devoid of humans but occupied by other natural elements including some non-human animals, to be a construction of the human mind. In a post-humanist discourse, animals, being part of our environment, constructed and non-constructed, shape and occupy our physical and psychological landscapes. The cultural deployment of animal representations in general seeks or manages to frame and delimit our understanding of the animal whereas art of the kind proposed may test the preconceptions and force them open for reappraisal.