'Everything is bigger than this’: mediated ecologies in Caroline Barneaud and Stefan Kaegi’s Shared Landscapes

Drawing on interdisciplinary research, this essay analyzes Shared Landscapes, a seven-hour site-specific production in which 300 participants navigated through seven performative installations in a forest just outside Berlin. Funded by the European Union and co-curated by Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll) and Caroline Barneaud (Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne), Shared Landscapes deploys various media – such as wireless headphones, Virtual Reality headsets, and 3-D sound technology – to explore the relationship between urban and rural areas, the embeddedness of global processes within local sites, and the entwinement of technology and nature. Kaegi and Barneaud invited artists from across Europe to compose intermedial works that could be staged with minimal impact and adapted for the Hangelsberg forest. The result is a mobile, multi-disciplinary, highly mediated collective encounter with landscape – as a perspective, idea, economy, geopolitical formation, object of study, and agency. Shared Landscapes upends anthropocentric perspectives of landscape conditioned by a Euro-American social and aesthetic history in a series of provocations that extend sensory perceptions and expand awareness of how environments are constituted through networks of interdependence. Landscape, in this production, is not a bounded scene contemplated by a human observer, but rather a mediated ecology of connections between human intentions and planetary forces. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group