Living landscape: Art, embodiment, and nature-based solutions in Cagliari

In Cagliari, in Southern Italy, the relationship with the land is deeply woven into the city’s identity. As an island city, both physically and symbolically distant from the mainland, Cagliari has often been perceived as peripheral, a place to be consumed for its aesthetic charm, cultural heritage, and, increasingly, its solar energy potential.

Yet, this narrative does not capture the city’s full story. Creativity thrives here, often in surprising ways, offering lessons even to those who see themselves as frontrunners of innovation. Among these lessons is the intentional weaving of art and nature, where art and nature are not merely ornamental but a transformative force that reimagines urban space and nurtures co-evolutionary, multispecies, and creative learning processes.

“We live in a city that is strongly dominated by cars, and as such, even nature becomes a space accessible only on Sundays, not a space where it is realistically possible to live.” (Interview conducted as part of the Cagliari case study, 2024)

Art as a Nature-Based Solution

Art has the capacity to broaden the scope of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), offering a fertile ground for ecological and cultural storytelling. In this expanded frame, artists, performers, and creative practitioners play a vital role in co-designing nature-inspired infrastructures.

Figure 1. The author, Carla De Agostini, during the ecosomatic practice mentioned in the blog, at Is Concias near Cagliari, Italy. The photo was taken during the workshop Pietre che (in)cantano (“Stones that (en)chant”), held in October 2024 as part of the Formati Silvestri program, curated by A Corpo Vivo and led by vocal coach Claudia Ciceroni and environmental guide Renato Capocchia. Photo by A. Crespo.

Figure 2. Collective moment from the workshop Pietre che (in)cantano, focused on vocality and ecosomatic practices, at the Tomb of the Giants in Is Concias, near Cagliari, Italy. Photo by A. Crespo.

A compelling example of this is the work of Teatro di Sardegna, which has redefined the role of the theatre by becoming a space for bold, open, feminist, and multispecies discourse despite being an established cultural institution. One of its most evocative projects, La Città che Cammina, is a durational landscape performance created by the DOM- collective. It takes participants on a four-hour journey across the city on foot, transforming walking into an artistic and political act.

The performance immerses participants in a multisensory dialogue with the city, where human and non-human figures move through space in parallel dimensions. Through this embodied choreography, the city is no longer a fixed backdrop but a living, breathing canvas, rich with untold stories and latent futures. By merging environmental humanities, feminist and queer ecologies, and site-specific narration, the piece disrupts normative patterns of movement and perception, challenging power structures and spatial hierarchies.

The power to imagine otherwise

Nature-based solutions address urban challenges through synergy with ecological processes, not only in practice but also by reshaping collective imaginaries. But when we ask what real alternatives exist to traditional urban planning, the answer often lies not in blueprints but in practices that embrace complexity, context, and iteration [1].

This is where art matters — not as an embellishment or a frivolous hobby but as a critical, generative practice that expands planning vocabulary. Artistic processes create openings, conceptual and spatial, for imagining otherwise. They welcome knowledge systems beyond the conventional domain of “expertise,” making room for intuition, emotion, memory, and speculative thinking.

This is an ecosomatic approach to embodied knowledge and ecological awareness. Projects like Formati Silvestri, developed by the collective A Corpo Vivo in Cagliari, offer a powerful example of how NBS can be expanded through somatic and experiential methodologies. The initiative integrates ecosomatic practices, where movement, sensory experience, and environmental awareness intersect, to foster deeper relationships between people and place.

“The idea of the collective body is absolutely anti-speciesist, I don’t know how else to put it. The idea is to move like a leaf. The idea is to sense the song of the stone — but it’s not that we’re crazy, […] the point is to adopt a receptive posture towards the environment.” (interview conducted as part of the Cagliari case study 2024)

In these guided journeys and workshops, participants traverse landscapes with environmental experts to observe, feel, sense, and move with the land, blurring the artificial boundaries between body and environment. As ecosomatic pioneer Andrea Olsen reminds us, “we are part of, not separate from, the earth we inhabit.”

Beyond certainty and nostalgia

Such embodied approaches are vital to NBS, revealing that ecological design must account for functional or technical performance as well as how people physically and emotionally inhabit space. They offer a pathway to cultivating ecological awareness as a lived, sensory experience. At a time when environmental crises call for urgent action, art offers a space to pause, reflect, and dream.

Figure 3. Silvia Ciceroni engaged in the sensory practice of forest listening and the exploration of vocal touch during the same workshop. Photo by A. Crespo.

In this light, art-infused NBS are not just interventions but actively unsettle rigid paradigms, opening urban space to the unimagined and the emergent. This does not mean romanticizing nature or retreating into nostalgia. Instead, it means recognizing that urban landscapes are layered with contested histories, ideologies, and power structures. They must be actively read, questioned, and re-authored through inclusive, interdisciplinary, and imaginative processes.

The future of cities lies not in returning to outdated planning paradigms but in embracing uncertainty, experimentation, and co-creation. By weaving together, the sensibilities of artists with the pragmatism of planners and ecologists, we can move beyond false binaries, human vs. nature, built vs. wild, expert vs. layperson, and cultivate cities that are more alive, more equitable, and more responsive to the rhythms of the earth.

Perhaps the challenge of our contemporary era is not only to find solutions but to cultivate new capacities for perception, imagination, and co-existence with the more-than-human.

Art invites us to sense possibilities and experiment.

So let’s get started.

Footnotes

[1] Isola, F., Lai, S., Leone, F., & Zoppi, C. (2024). Urban Green Infrastructure and Ecosystem Service Supply: A Study Concerning the Functional Urban Area of Cagliari, Italy. Sustainability, 16(19), 8628.

Author: Carla de Agostini

I am an early-career researcher passionate about traditional ecological knowledge, socio-ecological studies, and environmental justice. I am currently working between EU institutions and UN-led reforestation projects, bridging interdisciplinary perspectives and environmental institutions’ ambitions with local needs to climate adaptation. Having a deep curiosity and openness to systems thinking, I’m especially drawn to participatory approaches to ecological governance.