Residual landscapes: active traces of the built environment

Yasmin Gapper

Drawing on photographer Edward Burtynksy’s notion of ‘residual landscapes’, this essay examines the affective, sensual and temporal reverberations generated in contemporary spaces of ruination. It firstly traces the history of the ruin as an aesthetic category in Western thought, and considers this in relation to Burtynksy’s photographic work. It then analyses several ethnographies of ruination, suggesting that across transnational and cultural contexts, sites of ruination leave active impressions on the landscape, resulting in altered affective and sensory relations between humans and their lived environments. Spaces of ruination, I suggest, blur the boundary between human and non-human timescales, and disrupt the traditional association between cultural heritage and material permanence. In doing so, these spaces also disrupt linear human-historical narratives of modernisation and progress. Finally, I consider how certain contemporary architecture practices have embraced intentional ruination in their designs, using a case study of the recently completed Weston Gallery in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I aim to argue that, taken together, these studies offer an alternative framework for the analysis of human-material relations in the Anthropocene, one that understands ruination as an agential, unresolved process.


‘I do believe there is much we can learn from deciphering the complex marks we make upon the landscape. Whether it is in building roadways, how we farm, the tailing residue from mining operations, whatever; it is the marks that are left behind that tells of the people who made them. It’s as if I’m creating a visual archaeology, but rather than digging into the past, I’m preserving the present moment.’ (Burtynsky from Campbell 2008: 43-8)

Figure 1: Edward Burtynsky. Shipyard #21, Zhejiang province, China, 2005

Figure 1: Edward Burtynsky. Shipyard #21, Zhejiang province, China, 2005

Figure 2: Edward Burtynsky, Wan Zhou #4,Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China, 2005

Figure 2: Edward Burtynsky, Wan Zhou #4,Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China, 2005

This excerpt, taken from Craig Campbell’s 2008 interview with Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, frames sites of ruination not as obsolete vestiges of an evanescent past, but as active traces that continually shape the cultural and affective landscapes in which they are situated. Burtynsky employs the term ‘residual landscapes’ to describe ‘marginalized’ sites of ruination, such as recycling yards, dams, quarries or mines (Ibid: 41). These do not ‘permeate image culture’, but nor do they simply vanish: with every ‘useful’ built environment, there always exists an ‘equivalent negative space’ (Ibid: 41-2). Residual landscapes undergo profound transformation through industrial processes and, once neglected or destroyed, transform into something ‘between the natural landscape and a man-imprinted landscape’ (Ibid). Though Burtynsky does not use the word ‘ruin’ to describe his subject matter, his work critically examines monumental processes of decay, entropy and ruination that are usually hidden from public sight. These sites of ruination leave traces in the physical landscape and in the human consciousness. They hold potential for alternative engagements with the natural world, especially pertinent in an era of anthropogenic climate change.

Drawing inspiration from Burtynsky’s notion of ‘residual landscapes’, this essay will examine the affective, sensual and temporal reverberations generated by contemporary sites of ruination. The central question I am addressing is: in what ways are contemporary ‘residual landscapes’ materially, affectively and temporally disruptive, and how do the inhabitants of these ‘residual landscapes’ negotiate their entropic surroundings? I suggest that, through intimate, multi-sensory engagement with entropic matter, residual landscapes are radically generative of new modes of affective and temporal experience.

The four objectives of this essay are as follows: I begin by critically examining the aesthetic history of ruins in Western thought, focusing on their significance in relation to the categories of the picturesque and the sublime. I consider Burtynsky’s work in relation to this: historically, in Western thought, ocular-centric discourses romanticized sites of ruination, yet Burtynsky’s residual landscapes resist becoming objects of a romanticized gaze. Although Burtysnky’s work is ocular-centric, conducted through the photographic medium, the subject matter resists a romanticizing impulse, instead instilling a sense of ‘uncomfortable pleasure’ in the viewer (Jaquette-Ray 2011: 3). Secondly, I examine how residual landscapes generate alternative forms of affect that are rooted in material engagement with entropic matter. Here, I emphasise Navaro-Yashin’s critical distinction between subjectivity and affect to examine the affective atmospheres that exist between residual landscapes and their inhabitants. Thirdly, I examine how residual landscapes catalyse alternative forms of temporal consciousness by merging human and geological timescales. To consider how ‘residual landscapes’ make visible the interdependency of human and geological timescales, I draw upon Reinhardt Koselleck’s theory of human-historical time. Finally, building upon my initial discussion of the aesthetic history of the ruin, I examine an architectural practice based in the UK that is re-appropriating ruination as ethical practice in the Anthropocene, drawing inspiration from the works of 1960s land artist Robert Smithson.

Theoretical framework

This essay will adopt a dual theoretical framework. Primarily, I shall draw upon the anthropology of ruination and material culture. Recent anthropological literature has approached ruins of ‘the recent past, dynamic and unsettled’ through an interdisciplinary lens, one that incorporates insights from archaeology, material culture and cultural geography (DeSilvey and Edensor 2012: 466). Moving away from the notion of ruins as ‘vestiges from an ancient past’, ethnographic approaches have emphasised the immediacy of ‘physical and social detritus’ left by ‘capitalist, state, and imperial projects and conflicts’ (Gordillo 2011: 142). What links this wide-ranging body of literature on ruination is the notion that, though these sites have been deemed ‘residual or unproductive’, they remain ‘open to appropriation and recuperation’ (Ibid: 467). This literature is rooted in the premise that that ruins are not discrete objects, but rather ongoing processes whereby ‘agencies of decay and deterioration are still active and formative’ (Ibid: 466). These ethnographies shift focus away from the discursive and symbolic significance of ruins towards their ‘lived presence’ and ‘non-representational power’ to ‘activate memory and sensation’ (Ibid.). Within this body of literature, I draw especially on the Deleuzian theory of non-subjective affect, which Navaro-Yashin cites in her ethnography of ruination in Cyprus: ‘affects are not feelings, they are becomings that go beyond those who live through them (they become other)’ (Deleuze in Thrift 2000: 219). I also draw upon Koselleck’s theory of human-historical time, which argues that the construction of human-historical time is always ‘tied to social and political units of action, to particular acting and suffering human beings, and to their institutions and organizations’ (Koselleck in Chakrabarty: 2018: 16).

Building upon the anthropology of ruination, I shall also employ an art-historical and art-theoretical lens, contextualizing the aesthetic history of ruins and concluding this essay with a case study of intentional ruination in a UK architectural commission. An overview of the art-historical literature can be gleaned from Brian Dillon’s anthology Ruins (Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), which collates nineteenth and early twentieth century texts on ruin aesthetics, later twentieth century texts on the relations of ruins to modernity, and postmodern explorations of entropy and decay in environmental art from the 1960s onwards. This literature contributes to the anthropology of ruination by emphasising how ruins, in their historical as well as their contemporary formation, contain myriad visual and symbolic significances. The anthropology of ruination can, in turn, widen scope for analysis beyond the Western art-historical canon, illuminating how these entropic processes are transnational phenomena, despite their local specificities.

The ruin as aesthetic spectacle

I firstly begin with the aesthetic history of the ruin, as the ruin has been an ‘essential aesthetic concept and recurrent image’ in Western thought since the Renaissance (Dillon 2011: 12). In Renaissance art, ruins functioned predominantly as an allegorical backdrop, and as an enticing allusion to a distant classical past (DeSilvey and Edensor: 2012: 465). Building upon the emotive and symbolic potency of ruins, Baroque artists employed the ruin as a visual motif to convey the ‘melancholic power of transience and decay’ (Ibid: 466). By the eighteenth century Romantic period, ruins gained further cultural significance and prominence, as evidenced by the emergence of ‘Ruinenlust’. Ruinenlust was an ocular-centric phenomenon, rooted in the ‘aesthetics of pleasurable decay’ (DeSilvey and Edensor 2012: 466). Gordillo argues that humanistic studies of ruins, characterised by ‘eminently bourgeois engagement’, downplayed the status of ruins as ‘socio-historical configurations’ shaped by power relations, and instead emphasised their potential for inward self-reflection and contemplation (2011: 142). Against the backdrop of Ruinenlust, images of ruins acquired newfound significance in relation to the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the picturesque. Edmund Burke proposed the notion of ‘the sublime’ in the mid-eighteenth century to describe an aesthetic that induced feelings of sheer awe and overwhelmed the human subject. Kant similarly argued that the sublime was less a descriptive category than a mental state, induced by our ‘inability to fathom the power’ of the object witnessed (Peeples 2011: 379). The sublime invoked ‘vastness, privation, difficulty, infinity, magnitude and magnificence’. By contrast, the ‘picturesque’ described typically beautiful subject matter that was smooth, delicate, and pleasing to the eye (Ibid). Sites of ruination, such as ‘rural tumbledowns, classical sites of medieval vestiges’ were ‘objects of the romantic gaze’, and were seen to evoke the melancholic passage of time (Edensor 2011: 323). Ruins, in eighteenth and nineteenth century Western thought, adhered to, and reinforced, a strict aesthetic code defined in relation to the picturesque and the sublime.

By adhering to a strict aesthetic code, ruins maintained the ‘harmonious balance of nature and culture’ (DeSilvey and Edensor 2012: 466). In Enlightenment and Romantic thought, ‘nature’ existed as a passive, monolithic and unchanging backdrop within which human ‘culture’ operated. Natural resources were entirely separate from the domain of culture, and perceived to be for humanity’s consumption and disposal. In Georg Simmel’s 1911 essay ‘The Ruin’, ruins are described as the ‘accommodation between nature and culture’, existing as the ‘artificial object sliding imperceptibly towards an organic state’ (Dillon 2011: 13). By existing as the ‘accommodation’ between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ruins highlighted and reinforced this dichotomous framework. Ruins were not disruptive encroachments upon the landscape, as they could be observed and marvelled at from a distance; they upheld the balance between nature and culture in Western thought.

Burtynsky and the 'toxic sublime'

Burtynsky’s work, by contrast, does not succumb to this romanticizing impulse, portraying sites of post-industrial ruination that do not adhere to categories of the sublime and the picturesque. Peeples coins the term ‘toxic sublime’, suggesting that Burtynsky’s photographs frame sites of post-industrial ruination as both overwhelming and unnerving, fostering an ambivalent relationship with the viewer (2011: 373). She points out that eighteenth century Romantic understandings of the sublime referred to awe-inspiring sites of nature. By the twentieth century, this sense of awe was increasingly associated with man-made objects whose ‘immensity and magnificence’ rivalled the natural world, termed the ‘technological sublime’ (Ibid: 379). Yet today, humanity’s relationship to technological innovation is fraught and ambivalent, in light of growing awareness of the devastating consequences of anthropogenic climate change. These photographic stills, selected from Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes (2006), taken in disused quarries in the United States, illustrate this ambivalence that one experiences from viewing sites of ecological ruination.

Figure 3: Edward Burtynsky Rock of Ages #7, E.L Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1991.

Figure 3: Edward Burtynsky Rock of Ages #7, E.L Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1991.

Figure 4: Edward Burtynsky, Mines #22. Kennecott Copper Mine, Utah 1983.

Figure 4: Edward Burtynsky, Mines #22. Kennecott Copper Mine, Utah 1983.

Figure 5: Edward Burtynsky, Rock of Ages #15, E.L Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1992.

Figure 5: Edward Burtynsky, Rock of Ages #15, E.L Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1992.

Figure 4 portrays the coal-mining town of Frackeville, Pennsylvania, a region whose economy and landscape has been radically transformed by extractive industry. A sense of temporal and environmental sedimentation permeates these images, exposing incremental incursions into the landscape. While these man-made incursions have generated ecological and environmental ruination, these sites have also functioned as useful spaces of production. Not quite obsolete, yet lacking human presence, these photographs frame ruination as a gradual unfolding process that lacks a definitive endpoint. These photos appeal to a sense of the ‘toxic sublime’, which shares with the ‘technological sublime’ a ‘marvel at human accomplishments’, yet is paired with discomfort, horror and bewilderment at the scale of human-made damage (Peeples 2011: 380). Burtynsky’s work is suggestive of how contemporary ruination upsets the categories of the picturesque and the sublime, and the traditional Western association between beauty and value.

Residual landscapes as affective atmospheres

Considering the ethically and aesthetically disruptive potential of ‘residual landscapes’, I now turn towards several ethnographies that examine the affective dimensions of ruined spaces. These forms of affect, I emphasise, emerge through intimate engagement with entropic matter. Here, I draw upon Deleuze’s theory of non-subjective affect, summarised by Navaro-Yashin as the ‘sensual intensities that may move through human bodies, but that do not necessarily emerge from them’ (2009: 12). Deleuze draws upon the Spinozist notion of the ‘passions’, or ‘affectus’ in articulating the relationship between the mind and the body. Susan James argues that, in contrast to Descartes, Spinoza believed it was impossible to separate the experience of an emotion into is ‘physical and psychological components’ (James 1997: 144). Instead, Spinoza suggested that our ‘sensations, sensory perceptions, and memories’ are all ‘ideas of things … shaped by the responses of our bodies to a range of stimuli’ (Ibid: 144). Thus, drawing upon Deleuze, Navaro-Yashin argues that one cannot privilege the Cartesian ‘thinking and fully conscious human’ as the ‘singular object of analysis’, as this approach overlooks how affect manifests in the subject without the subject’s conscious awareness (2014: 12). Rather, our mental and somatic perceptions of our surroundings are fluidly interlinked and we are not always fully cognizant of these perceptions.

Navaro-Yashin, in her ethnography of Turkish-Cypriot communities living in the aftermath of traumatic political violence, explores the melancholic affect created in the interplay between ruined spaces and their inhabitants. She defines ruination as both the ‘material remains or artefacts of destruction and violation’, and the ‘residual affects that linger, like a hangover, in the aftermath of war or violence’ (2009: 5). The ethnography examines a community of Turkish-Cypriots living in Northern Cyprus, which was partitioned in 1974 following civil war (Ibid: 1). Turkish-Cypriot communities living in the aftermath of political violence have had to reconstruct their livelihoods appropriating ‘dwellings, objects and spaces’ left behind by the Greek-Cypriots (Ibid: 4). Inhabitants of these absented spaces describe a pervasive sense of ‘melancholic interiority’ or maraz (Ibid.). This affective atmosphere of maraz, Navaro-Yashin argues, cannot be fully explained entirely in terms of human interiority or ‘subjectivity’, as maraz emerges in interaction of local residents with spaces transformed by entropy. Rather, as one Turkish-Cypriot woman remarked of her home assigned to her by the post-partition government, ‘I never warmed to this house’, though ‘we have lived in it for thirty years’ (Ibid: 4).

Similarly, Edensor’s ethnographic research into post-industrial regions in the UK examines the affective and sensual afterlives of spaces that have been neglected through socio-political upheaval (Edensor 2005). Edensor focuses on industrial landscapes of the North and Midlands regions, which have either been ‘abandoned or demolished’ since the 1980s. As British economies became more oriented towards ‘providing services and media and information products’, former industrial sites such as ‘old mills, work-shops, breweries, forges’ were pushed to the imaginative margins of these spaces, and subsequently failed to attract enough ‘inward investment’ for redevelopment (Ibid: 313-4). These processes of industrial ruination, Edensor suggests, are produced through the relentless ‘capitalist quest for profit maximization’. This process was geographically and temporally uneven, as some sites were sold off and rapidly demolished, while others gently ‘subsided into disuse’, still ‘lingering on’ in the landscape (Ibid.). As these industrial sites ‘fall into obsolescence’ and disrepair, they produce a materially ‘defamiliarized landscape’ (Ibid: 312-8). By dismantling the normative spatial and material ordering of the site, these sites are relegated to the status of waste. Waste is usually defined as the residual material that can no longer be used in any meaningful way, and the term “wasteful” connotes excess and carelessness. Yet as ruins are ‘stripped of their use and exchange values’, they become ‘replete with fantasies, desires and conjectures’ (Ibid: 330). Thus, while these post-industrial sites no longer hold an explicit socio-economic function, this loss of value makes room for alternative affective and sensory engagements with entropic matter.

Likewise, Pelkmans’ study of a former mining town in post-Soviet Krgyzstan suggests that sites of ruination and absence exert affects of hope and nostalgia. Ak-Tiuz is currently home for nine hundred residents, yet in the past decade over 4,000 former residents vacated the town following the closure of the metallurgical mine and ore concentration factories in the 1990s (2013: 17). These spaces have been emptied of human presence, and succumb to ‘ruination’ as they lose their explicit utility. For the residents of Ak-Tiuz, this ruination was largely intangible and invisible. Instead of visible debris, the destruction of the town left ‘virtually clean spaces’, exposing the bare skeletal frameworks of buildings (Ibid: 20). All that remains of these ‘vanished buildings’ is their bare concrete infrastructures, while the mud walls of houses are being ‘eroded by rain and frost’ (Ibid: 21). Yet this post-apocalyptic landscape of ‘poisonous industrial waste dumps’ and ‘warehouses overgrown by vegetation’ exudes ‘emotive energies’ of nostalgia, hope and fear among residents (Ibid: 17-18).

Pelkman’s study highlights how, through the ‘lived presence’ of ruined spaces, the distinction between future-oriented hope and backwards-looking nostalgia becomes blurred. One woman who remained in Ak-Tiuz, named Mirgul, clung onto the hope that she would eventually be employed again in the town as a nurse, and when turned down for the job, lamented that past employers used to prioritise ‘locally skilled labour’, as ‘back then they cared about the community’ (Ibid: 21). Feelings of hope for a better future amongst residents also succumb to entropy, as those who remained in Ak-Tiuz remained vulnerable to the ‘forces of nature, the market, and government’ (Ibid). Pelkmans’ study suggests how, for residents of Ak-Tiuz, socio-economic vulnerability and precariousness become entangled in processes of material and affective ruination.

Across these ethnographies, ruination is a lived process dually tangible and intangible: the effects of visible material ruination cannot be disentangled from its invisible affective properties. All of these ‘residual landscapes’, through socio-political upheaval and destruction, engender widespread human absence, yet continue to create new affective and sensual meanings through their altered material states.

Residual landscapes as temporal ruptures

Moreover, residual landscapes generate alternative forms of temporal experience by blurring the distinction between human-historical and geological timescales. On the one hand, sites of ruination make visible various human-historical processes, notably the construction of ‘modernity’ and its linear narratives of progress and capital accumulation. Modernity was rooted in the assumption that time ‘passes irreversibly and annuls the entire past in its wake’ (Latour from Dawdy 2010: 762). Through material rupture, residual landscapes make visible the fallability embedded in these human-historical processes, such as ‘industrialization, fascism, socialism, or any individual or generational history’ (Barndt 2010: 273). For instance, Gordillo’s ethnography of state violence in northern Argentina reveals how processes of ruination disrupt seamless narratives of globalization and modernization. In the northern Argentinian provinces of Salta, and neighbouring Jujury, local residents negotiate multilayered processes of historical and contemporary ruination and destruction. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, European imperial officials sought to modernise Gran Chaco, at the time governed by indigenous groups, by launching steamships on the river to facilitate a commercial route across the region. The river’s ‘challenging geography’ meant that the project was eventually abandoned, leaving what one resident called the ‘rusty overgrown remains of un barco en el monte, a ship in the forest’ (2014: 141). These steamships were left stranded in the dried up river, serving as a ‘poignant expression of abandonment and decline’ of modernizing ambitions (Ibid).

Yet, as recent scholarship has suggested, sites of ruination are simultaneously embedded in the temporal rhythms of natural landscapes. Ruined spaces are embedded in the ‘longue durée of geological time’, whereby material decay occurs on an incremental and non-linear timescale (Ibid: 273). Here, I draw upon Koselleck’s theory of human-historical time. Koselleck proposed that the texture of human-historical time is rooted in affect, in specific ‘acting and suffering human beings’ and their ‘institutions and organizations’ (Koselleck from Chakrabarty 2018: 16). Yet, as Chakrabarty points out, both human-historical time and geological time are ‘tinged’ with affect, as both are ‘expressive of human categories’ (2018: 13). Koselleck’s theory accommodates for geological time by framing temporal consciousness as layered rather than linear, accommodating for the ‘plurality and non simultaneity of historical times’ (Barndt 2010: 273). It recognizes that our experience of time is constituted through layers of varying durations that are ‘nonetheless present and effectual at the same time’ (Ibid: 271). By viewing human and geological timescales as fluidly entangled and proximate, sites of ruination become radically temporally disruptive, inhabiting multiple temporalities at once.

Residual landscapes are also temporally disruptive because they challenge conventional associations between heritage, cultural memory and the immortalised ‘lives’ of objects. Historically, museums and archives have sought a ‘pervasive identification’ between the ‘social significance of an artefact and its physical permanence’ (Colloredo-Mansfled from DeSilvey 2014: 324). Edensor similarly argues that in ‘heritage sites, museums and other exhibitionary spaces’, objects are immortalised and immobilized through their display as ‘icons of memory’ or ‘cultural or historical exemplars’ (2011: 312). Conservation technologies are designed to ‘slow or halt the physical decay’ of objects deemed valuable cultural artefacts, seeking to make artefacts immune to the entropic effects of time. Rather, DeSilvey’s ethnography of an abandoned rural homestead in Montana suggests that artefacts are not temporally ‘stable entities’, but rather inhabit a ‘blurred terrain where nature and culture are not so easily … distinguished and dichotomised’ (DeSilvey 2006: 325). During the twentieth century, the family inhabitants of this homestead, established in the Rocky Mountains in 1889, ran a ‘market garden and subsistence operation’ (Ibid: 319). Yet by the 1990s, this economy could no longer sustain itself, and the homestead fell into ruin and disrepair. DeSilvey observes how a multitude of non-human actors then intervened into the space: the farmer’s root cellar, for instance, now has ‘crumbling earth walls and a pervasive sense of sour rot’ (Ibid: 329). Insects had eaten into several maps, creating patterned sequences of decay, and offered their own commentary on ‘human intervention in regional ecologies’ (Ibid). By drawing attention to the role of non-human agencies in ruination, DeSilvey’s instead suggests that ‘entropic intervention’ does not have to be perceived as destructive, as objects in ruins persist in altered circumstances.

Intentional ruination as architectonic approach

Finally, I turn to reconsiderations of the productive value of ruination in a contemporary UK architecture practice. In recent decades, a renewed consideration towards sustainable material usage has led architecture practices to accommodate for and embrace ruination. These projects are, in part, reacting to a culture of accelerated waste disposal and fleeting life spans of material things. They seek to re-instil a sense of humility into the design of built environments in the Anthropocene by recognizing that human and geological time are fluidly interlinked, and embracing the productive potential of ruination. In 2019, Feilden Fowles, an architecture practice based in the UK, completed the Weston Gallery space in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Fowles states the practice envisaged the existence of the gallery space ‘long outlasting the building’s useful life, like the remnants of a drystone wall’ (Disegno Daily: 2019). The notion of a building’s ‘useful life’ echoes sentiments about ruins as obsolete infrastructures. Here, Fowles identifies two distinct yet interlinked lifespans of a building: its ‘useful life’, and its ongoing existence as it loses its social utility. Sites of ruination typically hold connotations of obsolescence and wastage, yet here, the architects have designed a space with the intention of future ruination embedded in the structure, so that the perceived ‘utility’ of the space is not determined by its lifespan.

Figure 6: Feilden Fowles. 2019. Long Section Cut And Cross Section Cut Of The Weston.

Figure 6: Feilden Fowles. 2019. Long Section Cut And Cross Section Cut Of The Weston.

figure 7.png
Figure 7: Olsson, Mikael. 2019. The Weston, Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Figure 7: Olsson, Mikael. 2019. The Weston, Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The space’s design was informed in part by the ‘earthworks’ and writings of land artist Robert Smithson, who held a ‘fascination with the entanglement of the earth and time’ (Ibid.). Drawing on Smithson’s statement that the ‘strata of the earth is a jumbled museum’, the Weston employs a similar ‘typology of rearranging and shifting earth to reveal the process of making as a response to the site’ (Ibid.). The concrete walls of the structure use multiple ‘exposed local aggregates’, creating a ‘strata-like effect’; this sense of temporal sedimentation reinforced by the situation of the building on a ‘former millstone grit quarry’ ("The Weston, Yorkshire Sculpture Park" 2019). As with the ethnographies I have examined, this project frames ruination as an active, ongoing process that is in a perpetual state of becoming, and one that creates alternative engagements with the natural landscape and geological time.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have traced the aesthetic, historical and contemporary ethnographic significance of ruins and ruination, arguing that sites of ruination are materially, sensually and temporally disruptive when viewed through an affective and material-oriented lens. I have drawn upon the Deleuzian notion of non-subjective affect, and Koselleck’s theory of human-historical time to suggest that sites of ruination bring new forms of affective and sensual engagement into intimate proximity. In accordance with Navaro-Yashin, I have argued that it is necessary to move beyond linguistic, symbolic or discursive interpretations towards a material-oriented ontology of ruins. This approach is especially pertinent in the era of the Anthropocene, as the work of both Burtynsky and Feilden Fowles suggest, for negotiating our experiences of altered entropic landscapes.


ReferenceS

Images

Figure 1: Burtynsky, Edward. 2005. Shipyard #21. Qili Port, Zhejiang province, China. Image. https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/china.

Figure 2: Burtynsky, Edward. 2005. Wan Zhou #4. Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China. Image. https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/china.

Figure 3: Burtynsky, Edward. Rock of Ages #7, Active Section, E.L Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1991. Photographic still from Baichwal, Jennifer. 2008. Manufactured Landscapes. DVD. Canada: Zeitgeist Films.

Figure 4: Burtynsky, Edward. Mines #22. Kennecott Copper Mine, Bingham Valley, Utah 1983. Photographic still from Baichwal, Jennifer. 2008. Manufactured Landscapes. DVD. Canada: Zeitgeist Films.

Figure 5: Burtynsky, Edward. Rock of Ages #15, E.L Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1992. Photographic still from Baichwal, Jennifer. 2008. Manufactured Landscapes. DVD. Canada: Zeitgeist Films.

Figure 6: Feilden Fowles. 2019. Long Section Cut And Cross Section Cut Of The Weston. Image. https://www.architecture.com/awards-and-competitions-landing-page/awards/riba-regional-awards/riba-yorkshire-award-winners/2019/the-weston-yorkshire-sculpture-park.

Figure 7: Olsson, Mikael. 2019. The Weston, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Image. https://www.disegnodaily.com/article/building-in-the-anthropocene

 

Secondary sources

Barndt, Kerstin. 2010. "'Memory Traces Of An Abandoned Set Of Futures': Industrial Ruins In Postindustrial Landscapes Of Germany". In Ruins Of Modernity. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.

Campbell, Craig. 2008. "Residual Landscapes And The Everyday: An Interview With Edward Burtynsky". Space And Culture 11 (1): 39-50. doi:10.1177/1206331207310703.

Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2010. "Clockpunk Anthropology And The Ruins Of Modernity". Current Anthropology 51 (6): 761-793. doi:10.1086/657626.

Dean, Corinna. 2019. "Building In The Anthropocene". Disegnodaily, 2019. https://www.disegnodaily.com/article/building-in-the-anthropocene.

DeSilvey, Caitlin, and Tim Edensor. 2012. "Reckoning With Ruins". Progress In Human Geography 37 (4): 465-485. doi:10.1177/0309132512462271.

DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. "Observed Decay: Telling Stories With Mutable Things". Journal Of Material Culture 11 (3): 318-338. doi:10.1177/1359183506068808.

Dillon, Brian, and Iwona Blazwick. 2011. Ruins. London: Whitechapel Gallery.

Edensor, Tim. 2005. "Waste Matter - The Debris Of Industrial Ruins And The Disordering Of The Material World". Journal Of Material Culture 10 (3): 311-332. doi:10.1177/1359183505057346.

Gordillo, Gastón R. 2014 .Rubble: The Afterlife Of Destruction. Duke University Press.

James, Susan. 1997. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth Century Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Jaquette Ray, Sarah. 2016. "Environmental Justice, Vital Materiality And The Toxic Sublime In Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes". Geohumanities 2 (1): 203-219. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2016.1167615.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. "Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination And The Production Of Anthropological Knowledge". Journal Of The Royal Anthropological Institute 15(1): 1-18. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.01527.x.

Peeples, Jennifer. 2011. "Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes". Environmental Communication 5 (4): 373-392. doi:10.1080/17524032.2011.616516

Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2013. "Ruins Of Hope In A Kyrgyz Post-Industrial Wasteland". Anthropology Today 29 (5): 17-21. doi:10.1111/1467-8322.12060.

"The Weston, Yorkshire Sculpture Park". 2019. Architecture.com. https://www.architecture.com/awards-and-competitions-landing-page/awards/riba-regional-awards/riba-yorkshire-award-winners/2019/the-weston-yorkshire-sculpture-park.