Extraction sites—mines, quarries, oil fields—are landscapes of removal, where resources are torn from the ground for circulation elsewhere. They epitomize the operational landscapes of capitalism, restructuring ecologies into zones of depletion. While often hidden from public view, extraction sites underpin urban and industrial life. Their scars persist as both ecological wounds and archives of economic history.
How do we represent territories whose histories, economies, and ecologies have been shaped by centuries of extraction, yet are still often perceived as peripheral or empty? 1. Introduction In his book Norrland, journalist Po Tidholm opens with a poem that captures a long-standing reality: northern Sweden has long been a site of resource extraction— iron […]
Dr. Jevgeniy Bluwstein, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern, examines how the reductive Western view of landscapes reinforces colonization through exclusionary conservation practices, focusing on a case study of Tarangire National Park in Tanzania. Introducing the term “landscapism,” meaning the “double movement of colonizing landscapes/landscaping colonies,” Bluwstein offers a critical perspective, advocating for viewing landscapes through a lens of relationality.
Planet City is a worldbuilding project by Liam Young, envisioned as a multilayered city, occupying as little as 0,02 percent of Earth’s surface yet hosting all of the human population. Planet City is testing the Half-Earth idea by Edward O. Wilson, where we put aside half of the planet, to keep biodiversity. We spoke with Liam Young about the idea and the exhibition he curates, Visions of Planet City.
Caio Reisewitz has created an artistic intervention in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, titled “Suspendre el Cel”. To Suspend the Sky is the artist’s reference to activists shamans Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak, alluding to Indigenous practices and beliefs of Amazonian people that the earth is made out of the sky, so the sky […]
A post-industrial park is typically a sexy landmark, easy to make a story of, photogenic, and a palimpsest in itself. It presents a victory of public use over the private and industrial by opening previously closed-off spaces. A post-industrial park offers some crucial topics of remediation, adaptive reuse, and social integration, among others. For a […]
Liam Young is together with Kate Davies running the Unknown Fields project. They travel around the world and explore landscapes behind objects we used on a daily basis: materials for our phones, fabrics for clothes, lithium for batteries … We caught Liam in Ljubljana, where he was narrating Unknown Fields film live.
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