Babie lato, czyli zmysłowość wiejskiego krajobrazu

This essay offers an analysis of the countryside defined and perceived as an inhabited place but also as a landscape where the visual evolves into a multi-sensory experience. The text is divided into three sections corresponding to three dimensions of the landscape. The aesthetic dimension relates to the visual features of the landscape which determine its aesthetic sense. The participatory dimension comprises the cultural sense that encompasses the meanings inscribed in the landscape as well as the social and historical processes that make the taskspace with its patterns of dwelling activities. The third dimension, whose description is based on Józef Chełmoński’s painting Indian Summer, is represented by the embodied landscape defined by the polysensory features and tactility playing the primary role (the landscape can be ‘touched’). These three dimensions show how the relationship between humans and the landscape can change in two differing situations: when humans adopt a distanced attitude of viewers or that of participants who enter the landscape and shape it not only physically and symbolically, but also in the sensory dimension.