In all mythological, fairy tale or science fiction imaginaries, monsters are the «supernatural» or «counter-nature» encounter between the human and the wild and they are therefore controversial, paradoxical, irreducible to unity, coherence, and simplification. Divinatory creatures, monsters are made of the future, they are warnings. Anomalies that cannot be predicted or standardized, they therefore appear dysfunctional. Yet they are powerful, capable of unhinging the analgesic addiction to nostalgia and the performance obsession with efficiency.
Landscape is a monster when it can shatter the partitions and taxonomies of control, overcome the otherness between urban and natural, subvert the isomorphism of human habitat, suspend its ethical and aesthetic sedations, and unsettle with secularly prodigious visions, beyond the religions of ecology, «green», and consensual coming back to nature.
Annalisa Metta, architect, PhD in Landscape and Garden Design, she is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Roma Tre University. In 2016 she was the Italian Fellow in Architecture/Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, where she currently serves as advisor. She has lectured in many universities and cultural institutions, among which the School of Design at the Penn University in Philadelphia; the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, the École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage de Versailles / Marseilles, the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, the Parson School of Design in New York. Among her books: Il paesaggio è un mostro. Città selvatiche e nature ibride (2022); Wild and the City. Landscape Architecture for Lush Urbanism (2020); Southward. When Rome will have gone to Tunis (2018); Anna e Lawrence Halprin. Paesaggi e coreografie del quotidiano (2015). In 2007 she founded the Rome based design office Osa architettura e paesaggio. Among its works, Bosco Italia at the 13th Venice International Architecture Exhibition, Italian Pavillon.
