A Cratera Roden: Um inquérito ontológico

Abstract

The Roden Crater is a 400 000 years dormant volcano situated near Flagstaff, in Arizona, USA (35°25'33"N 111°15'31"W) close to the Grand Canyon. However, since 1974 Amer-ican artist James Turrell has been turning it into a naked eye observatory and a sort of aes-thetics laboratory. The Roden Crater, then, became at once a natural place, a scientific ob-servatory, and an artwork space. Enquiring its changing and increasingly multifarious on-tology allow us to rethink not only the boundaries between key dichotomies, namely natu-ral vs. artificial, science vs. art, and space vs. place, but also how they interrelate to form a dense semantic network.