From horizon to text: the cultural landscape as a semiotic category. The case of graffiti tag in Montevideo, Uruguay

This article studies the landscape from a perspective that takes the semiotic category of text to understand the material, immaterial and symbolic phenomena associated with a territory. It deals with the case of urban cultural landscapes and the incidence of the graffiti tag in their transformation. For this, a conceptual text model is taken as a starting point that allows the understanding of the landscape as a set of meanings open to the interpretation of whoever contemplates it. It is exemplified by the case of tag graffiti in Montevideo city. It is concluded that the landscape is not only a category of heritage, but also an epistemic instrument of a semiotic nature for the analysis of various phenomena related to the territory, from both a sensory and metaphorical dimension.