Conspiring the Landscape

Politics as Body-Territory

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between childhood, landscape, and politics from a phenomenological and decolonial perspective, drawing on fieldwork conducted at Fundação Casa Grande – Memorial do Homem Kariri (Ceará, Brazil). Starting from the hypothesis that a politics without territory is like a head without a body, we propose the notion of conspiring the landscape (from the Latin con-spirare, “to breathe together”) as a conceptual key for understanding practices through which children inhabit, narrate, and reinvent territory. Mobilising Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, Arendt’s notion of natality, Certeau’s invention of everyday life, and Afro-Indigenous epistemologies, we argue that the Foundation constitutes an experience of embodied politics: a political education of the senses in which childhood is not a preparatory stage but a form of political presence. As an original contribution, the article incorporates the framework of Inclusive Social Archaeology as a practice of reading landscape, fostering belonging, and cultivating political imagination.