Installation view of the work exhibited in the exhibition The Mountain Touch, curated by Andrea Lerda at Museo montagna, Turin 2022 / Photo: Mariano Dallago
I embed everything that sounds against my chest before our own horizon (2022)
Mixed-media installation
450 x 450 cm
During the exhibition, patients at a children's hospital also created models in a research project based on my artistic work, using it as a method to explore how nature can be applied as a healing tool for people in need of care. This collaborative aspect added a deeper dimension to the installation, linking artistic exploration with real-world therapeutic contexts. The project highlighted the importance of integrating art and science in health-related environments. It also emphasized how visual storytelling can serve as a bridge between imagination and physical recovery. In this way, the work became both a space for reflection and a platform for research-driven dialogue about care, place, and the restorative power of nature.
Peter Stridsberg develops his research predominantly through the photographic medium. In his practice he tries to explore and expand the borderland between personal dimension, nature and stage set. Fascinated by how the concept of landscape has evolved over time and the way it influences how we see and feel a place, the artist reflects on the physical and mental dynamics (bound to thought and perception) triggered by the encounter between human and natural dimensions.
The artist usually creates domestic sets directly in the natural environment and subsequently immortalises them via photography. With the ensuing pictures, in which the artist’s presence is fundamental, Stridsberg explores the physical and emotional relationship that exists between human beings and the environmental context.
For the exhibition, the artist has expanded his work mode and created the set of a bedroom within the exhibition context, a private space that the onlooker is invited to occupy. Seated on the bed in the room, the temporary inhabitant of this place can turn his/her gaze to the mountain landscape outside the window. The artist brings into play the condition of forced isolation experienced during the pandemic period, the sense of the impossible and, equally, the perceived need to be in direct contact with natural and outdoor environments such as mountain spaces or city parks.
In this sense, his work makes reference to two highly topical themes: “nature-deficit disorder” and “solastalgia”, both negative reactions generated by biological annihilation and the progressive extinction of experiences with nature. Richard Louv’s expression “nature-deficit disorder” refers to the impact of a lack of connection with nature on human health. According to Louv, this term describes “the human costs of alienation from nature: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, higher rates of emotional and physical illnesses…”
The term “solastalgia” was coined by Glenn Albrecht to describe that chronic emotion, situated and painful – a mix of comfort, nostalgia and destruction –, felt by human beings when they impotently observe the loss of a natural place as a result of the environmental devastation underway. Albrecht also coined the phrase “psychoterratic mental conditions” to describe the emotions, sentiments and illnesses – such as eco-anxiety and global fear – linked to the earth and mental health.
The benefits of “mediated nature”
The first scientific studies on the influence of nature and vegetation on health were the work of Professor Ulrich who conducted several experiments in the 1980s to “measure” the leverage of exposure to natural elements on recovery from stress and on healing processes. In one of his pioneering studies, he showed that patients who had a view of a garden from their post-operatory hospital room had a far better outcome in terms of time, complications and drug use than those who did not have a view of a green space.
Similar results were obtained in experiments conducted in prison, where cells with a view of green space and trees were generally associated with a smaller number of healthcare calls by prisoners. Numerous subsequent studies have corroborated Ulrich’s results on different types of patients, confirming the ability of exposure to the natural environment to improve emotional states, health and recovery from illness and increase pain tolerance. Patient reactions linked to the presence of plants in medical in-patient/diagnostic screening environments are no less impressive. Patients operated on for thyroidectomy, appendectomy and haemorrhoidectomy, to provide but an example, were found to have a greater tolerance of pain and as a result required minor recourse to painkillers, as well as being less anxious when plants were present in their hospital room. Similar results have also been obtained in healthy subjects with artificially induced pain.
Ulrich was also the first academic to demonstrate that just visualising images of forests prompts improvement in certain physiological parameters (blood pressure, alpha brainwave amplitude, muscular tension). Today, multiple studies demonstrate restorative effects and a reduction of stress linked to even indirect exposure to natural environments, i.e. via various types of “nature substitutes” such as photos, videos and virtual natural environments. Although “technological nature” cannot, of course, completely reproduce the effects of real nature and lacks many major advantages of forest immersion, virtual “immersive” technologies might be significant in improving the wellbeing of people with no direct access to nature or for whom direct contact with nature is not possible or indeed hazardous.
This applies primarily to subjects with physical disabilities or in situations of bedrest and treatment but also to certain forms of mental illness, including depression and anxiety.
Francesco Meneguzzo, Federica Zabini
Istituto per la BioEconomia, CNR – Sesto Fiorentino (FI) CAI Comitato Scientifico Centrale