curatorial projects.
LineScape Deconstruction: Mapping the Threshold Between Urbanity and Wilderness
Curated by Sophie Bonet
The Frank C. Ortis Gallery
Pembroke Pines, FL
Feb 8-May 18, 2024
In LineScape Deconstruction, Colombian-born artist Nathalie Alfonso transforms the gallery into an architectural fiction—a space where interior walls give way to imagined windows onto the threshold between the built environment and the Florida Everglades. Using soft pastels, charcoal, graphite, and pencil directly on the walls, Alfonso constructs an immersive mural installation that oscillates between control and surrender, precision and gesture. What emerges is not a singular view, but a network of perspectives—an interstitial cartography of fear, curiosity, ecology, and embodied perception.
The work draws from Alfonso’s gravel biking explorations through the Everglades, where human infrastructure dissolves into open terrain and the line between self and environment becomes porous. These rides, both physically demanding and psychologically disorienting, form the somatic foundation of the piece. Her experience recalls what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes as the “affective bond between people and place”—an emotional geography rooted in movement and memory.¹ As her body responds to the terrain, Alfonso maps not just landscape, but sensation.
Figure 1. Nathalie Alfonso, LineScape Deconstruction (work in progress), 2024. Soft pastel, charcoal, graphite, and pencil on wall. Photo: Juliana Atiencia. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines.
Alfonso’s process is not simply illustrative; it is architectural. The gallery walls become scaffolds for perception, reframing the viewer’s gaze as though looking outward from within an imagined building. The drawings reference South Florida’s urban grid—angular, structured, and impervious—while revealing glimpses of the organic, irregular contours of the Everglades. In this inversion, the built and the wild are not opposites but entangled systems. Her compositional framing evokes what Gaston Bachelard calls “the dialectics of inside and outside”—where the threshold becomes a psychological as much as spatial tension.²
The “starlight line,” a remote dirt road marking the edge of the Everglades, recurs throughout the work. For Alfonso, it is not only a literal boundary but a metaphor for ecological vulnerability and transition—a liminal space where perception shifts. The line recalls the philosophical resonance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, wherein seeing is not passive but relational.³ The viewer becomes implicated in the act of looking, moving, and sensing.
Fear and wonder coexist throughout the installation. The artist’s gestures trace not just the landscape, but its latent inhabitants: insects, spores, unseen forces. These forms—sometimes abstracted, sometimes gestural—evoke what anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose refers to as “multispecies entanglements,” where human life is deeply interwoven with nonhuman vitality.⁴ Alfonso’s mural becomes a record of these entanglements, collapsing the visual distance between urban observer and ecological participant.
Figure 3. Nathalie Alfonso, LineScape Deconstruction, 2024. Installation view at The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery. Photo: Zachary Balber. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines.
LineScape Deconstruction thus performs a spatial and perceptual deconstruction. The viewer is not placed in front of a landscape but inside its undoing—inside the act of unlearning human-centric spatial logic. Alfonso does not offer a stable horizon or panoramic view. Instead, she offers a fragmented, embodied encounter—a mural that breathes, shifts, and unsettles. In doing so, the work challenges the viewer to reconsider the boundaries between human and environment, architecture and memory, control and dissolution.
Ultimately, this exhibition is an ecological proposition. It invites us to imagine a different way of inhabiting space—one that acknowledges fragility, multiplicity, and interdependence. Through her choreographic linework and spatial poetics, Alfonso calls us to witness not just the landscapes we traverse, but the ones that traverse us.
Notes
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Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 136.
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Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 211.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 78.
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Deborah Bird Rose, “What If the Angel of History Were a Dog?” Cultural Studies Review 12, no. 1 (2006): 67–78.
Bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012.
Rose, Deborah Bird. “What If the Angel of History Were a Dog?” Cultural Studies Review 12, no. 1 (2006): 67–78.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.