Table Of ContentNatura
Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape
Edited by
Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, Dayron Carrillo Morell
DiAphAnEs
THINK ART series of the institute for Critical Theory (ith)—
Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts and
Cultural Theory (ZKK)—University of Zurich.
With the generous support of the Latin American Center Zurich (LZZ)
and the Centre for the Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK),
University of Zurich.
1st edition
isBn 978-3-0358-0053-1
© diaphanes, Zurich 2018
All rights reserved.
Cover image: ©REUTERs/Carlos Garcia Rawlins/
Latinstock México
Copy Editor: Tess Rankin
Layout: 2edit, Zurich
printed in Germany
www.diaphanes.com
Table of Contents
7 Jens Andermann
introduction
17 Emanuele Coccia
The Cosmic Garden
31 Ursula Biemann
Geomorphic Video
51 Maria Thereza Alves
The Return of a Lake
61 Genaro Amaro Altamirano
Dissipating Darkness
73 Oliver Lubrich
humboldtian Landscapes
111 Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira
Towards a Phanerology of images:
Karl Blossfeldt and the skin of the World
135 Nuno Ramos
Cabaré Chinelo, Manaus
145 Dayron Carrillo Morell
Aquatic Visions and Watery sounds: Ruptures and sutures
in the Lacustrine Landscape of Modern Mexico City
171 Lisa Blackmore
Colonizing Flow: The Aesthetics of hydropower and
post-Kinetic Assemblages in the Orinoco Basin
199 Álvaro Fernández Bravo
putrid, precarious Landscapes:
province, poverty, and the poetics of Dispossession in
some Contemporary Latin American Works
223 Javier Correa and Victoria Jolly
Ciudad Abierta
Solo es suelo lo que guarda el abismo—
Only What Holds the Abyss is a Ground
237 Jill h. Casid
necrolandscaping
265 Jens Andermann
Nach der Natur : Bio Art and Unspecific Lives
289 Contributors
Jens Andermann
Introduction
Dense, thick, fibrous, enmeshed: there is no exact equivalent
in English for espesso, the adjective João Cabral de Melo Neto,
the great Brazilian poet, associates with the living in “O Cão
Sem Plumas” (“The Dog without Feather,” 1950), the first part
of his poetic trilogy inspired by the Rio Capibaribe, the river
that meanders through the cane fields of Pernambuco before
it meets the sea at Recife. Thomas Colchie, in his 1971 transla-
tion for the Hudson Review, decides on heavy: “What is living
is heavy / like a dog, a man / like that river. // The way every-
thing real is heavy.”1 Colchie’s solution evokes the burden that
life has to carry in order to realize its potential, like the bird
which, in conquering flight, must also fend off the pull of grav-
ity: “Because much heavier is / the life which unfolds / in more
life, / the way a fruit / is heavier / than its flower, the way the
tree / is heavier / than its seed...”2 But what Colchie’s transla-
tion misses is the sensation of a thick, viscous, even deadly
interconnectedness that the Portuguese original also evokes,
because “what is living wounds” and “collides with what is liv-
ing”: “To live / is to go into what is living. // What is living / dis-
commodes life’s / silence, the sleep, the body...”3 Life is both
heavy and sharp, both pointed and soft, it slices and seeps into
other lives and into itself—or rather, it has no “itself” and thus
also no other, it is at once inside and outside (as is the river in
relation to the city). Life (human life, city life) is never alone, it
always vibrates with the foreign bodies it carries within itself—
1 João Cabral de Melo Neto, “The Dog without Feather,” trans. Thomas
Colchie, Hudson Review 24, no. 1 (Spring 1971): p. 23–35, here p. 33.
2 Ibid., p. 35.
3 Ibid., p. 33.
7
Jens Andermann
migrant, animal, vegetal, bacterial, mineral bodies—which the
river carries in and out of the city, and which inhabit it the way a
stray dog inhabits the street: “Like a living dog / inside a pocket.
/ Like a living dog / underneath the covers, / under the shirt, /
under the skin.”4
But then, there is also no vantage point, no “poetic I,”
capable of surveying this mesh of organic and inorganic life,
of objects and things, from the safely detached preserve of
the mind: because of life’s viscous, heavy stickiness, every “in
itself” of beings and objects immediately turns into the affect
that “goes into” something else, in an open and contingent
series of “collisions” with no unifying principle—no “Mother
Nature”—other than this very contingency. This is also why,
in Cabral’s poème-fleuve, there is no landscape, at least not in
the conventional sense of the sensory perception of an external
material universe (Umwelt) on behalf of a subject of cognition
that is therefore partially or completely removed from this same
plane of objectuality and materiality. Even though, nominally,
the poem alternates between the “landscape of the Capibaribe”
and the “fable” or “discourse of the Capibaribe”—cinemato-
graphically speaking, between “shots” of the river from the city
and “reverse shots” of the city from the river—in reality, these
games of perspective never really take place in the text because
both river and city are bodies without organs. Neither is capable
of “beholding” the other except through their mutual overspill
into each other, their becoming-city and becoming-river by
degrees. Instead of a landscape, predicated on the possibility
of distinguishing a subject of perception from the thing it per-
ceives, what we get in Cabral’s poem is more akin to the kind
of material assemblage that Jane Bennett has written about, in
which “each member and proto-member […] has a certain vital
4 Ibid., p. 33.
8
Introduction
force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as
such: an agency of the assemblage.”5
This book asks whether there can be an environmental aes-
thetics after the demise of the landscape-form. In this question,
“environmental aesthetics” is but a placeholder term, a stand-
in for the place left vacant by what, at least since Kant, has been
known in Western aesthetics as the question of natural beauty
and of its abyss and foundation: the sublime.6 The aesthetics of
nature had been entrusted with revealing the truth of which our
attraction to the pleasures and overwhelming force of “external
nature” is indicative, as Martin Seel still confidently asserts in
his 1991 Ästhetik der Natur (Aesthetics of Nature). The story of
natural aesthetics, Seel suggests, is that of a rivalry between
mimesis and inventio—between an idea of nature as the essence
and ideal towards which artistic “representation” must strive
and an idea of human ingeniousness breaking free of nature’s
constraints and becoming itself the Promethean measure of all
things.7 The relation between nature and art—art, in the wider
sense, as all that is manmade, as opposed to what is “found”
in nature—is metaphysical: art either reveals, inasmuch as is
possible for mere humans, the ideal essence or creative force at
work in nature’s all-encompassing wholeness, or it represents
the coming into its own of the human in transcending the mere
materiality of the nether world by force of the spirit, thus also
beginning to realize its divine, rather than profane, mandate
and filiation. The distinction between natura naturans (active,
creative nature as determining force and as synonymous with
God) and natura naturata (creaturely nature as the multiplicity
of emanations of the divine) that Christian scholastics adopted
5 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010), p. 24.
6 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 165–167, p. 184–191.
7 Martin Seel, Eine Ästhetik der Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1996 [1991]), p. 11–15.
9
