Ruins IV
Environmental Abstractions: Redefining Ruins and the Post-Human Lens
Rebecca Solnit, in a chapter of the book ‘The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness” entitled ‘Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the Post-American Landscape’ pays reference to a frieze in the lobby of the Hotel Pontchartrain in Detroit. The painting depicted a lakeside landscape with indigenous Indians stood amongst a lush vista of trees evoking the Ottawa and Huron tribes that resided in what would several hundreds years later be regarded as Detroit, a name that itself derives its meaning from the French for ‘strait’ or ‘narrows’; the author highlighting that French invaders would later recruit the indigenous peoples trap beaver.
Dr Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist, alongside his colleagues at the Wildlife Conversation Society in New York, spent a decade endeavouring to create a 3-D map of the lost historical ecology of Manhattan Island, as it would have been discovered by explorer Henry Hudson as he first sailed into New York Harbour in the fall of 1609, some 400 years prior to the start of this visual research project. The quest to recreate a vision of New York from centuries prior can be viewed as a vision of pre-urbanity that speculates on what a post-human future might look like. Landscape ecology as a field of study is concerned with how the natural features of the landscape - the streams, forests, meadows and hills - produce the conditions for animals and plants to establish habitats. Sanderson came across the British Headquarters map, made by British cartographers at the end of the American Revolution, that mapped many of the ecological and topographical features of the landscape for militaristic purposes. The ecologist believed that if he could successfully geo-reference this map alongside a modern map of the city that inhabitants might recognise, then some of the ‘lost futures’ of the underlying geography of New York could be pulled into sharper focus. Furthermore, the old map could be used to look back to establish features like the shoreline, the basic hydrology, the bedrock geology, surface geology, stream and over ecological aspects. In turn leading to soil maps, digital elevation models to establish the height of the hills and the gradient of the slopes and aspect, calculating winter wind exposure as well as various other implied relationships from the data, such as where the indigenous North American Lenape tribes may have settled to support their habitat requirements for food, shelter, water and reproductive resources. From here, the researchers could begin to model the animals and species present by formulating a network of habitat relationships.
The 3-D modelling programmes allowed these datasets and relationships to be geo-referenced onto the grid-like, modern day street plan, where a visualisation of Manhattan Island from any vantage point in three-dimensional space is possible, connecting the appearance of the contemporary city with the lost, or unseen, resident ecology. The modern city requires this ecological efficiency and in attempting to reconnect the ecological conditions that are inexplicably linked to the successful urbanisation of cities, Sanderson’s team hope to raise awareness to a future vision of cities that redresses some of the imbalances the modern sensibility screams out of view.
In “Photography After the Human”, Joanna Zylinska sets out to abstract the dominant notion of the human as the pivotal focal point in the understanding of the world, decentralising the human as transitory entity, itself acting alongside non human processes and agents. The intention of this abstraction is to introduce new conceptual frameworks that might be perceived beyond the scale of temporal, human history in a period referred to as the Anthropocene; an era where humanity is witness to the prevailing themes of environmental, economic and social turmoil leading to visualisations of humanity’s inevitable demise and extinction. Yet far from reinforcing a post-apocalyptic vision, Zylinska claims this reframing of the narrative gives rise to a sense of social responsibility, where the opportunity to arrest or slow the existentially environmental condition of the planet is given a greater sense of significance.
Gordillo draws attention to the recent discovery of a site of ruins in lowlands of the Northern Argentinian Andes in Chaco province, dating from the period of Spanish rule prior to Argentinian independence, unearthed due to the continued expansion of the mechanised agricultural business of Soy production.
The researcher, initially interested in how the indigenous local community, Criollos, would perceive the discovery and whether or not these peoples might value the ruins as holding any significance at all. Gordillo observed that in stark contrast to the attitudes of the local authorities, who viewed the findings as historically significant relics worthy of preservation, the indigenous Criollos pertained to a wholly alternative distinction, instead regarding ruins as synonymous to ‘rubble’, evoking a sense of indignation toward violence and destruction, preferable to any preservationism or memorialisation. The expanded processes of the Soy production in the region, which the researcher found had led to displaced communities, demolition and deforestation, coexisting alongside the recently discovered Spanish-era ruins, acknowledges a different classification of ruination. This distinction introduces a hierarchy of ruin, where some ruins are more worthy than others. It also articulates a perception of the image of ruins as having a classist dimension, where class standing and cultural background differentiates the significance and understanding of the ruin in contrasting terms; as ‘rubble’, the debris of destruction over a glorified relic of power, reducing the implied status and definition of the ruin to one that is not defined culturally by a standardised, Western worldview.
Through these recent abstractions, that challenge the very definitions and standardised cultural understandings of the ruin itself, it is perceptible that alternative renderings might illicit deeper and more nuanced relationships to the conceptualisation of ruins as humanity progresses into an age of increasingly overt ecological and environmental awareness.
By analysing depictions of ruins with consideration to a cultural lens of perception, we might attempt to wrestle out some of the ambiguity of context to better understand what is discernible from the image. Though, as it has been shown, perceptions become unclear, as throughout the course of these analyses we have seen issues relating to a broad range of factors; the artistic aesthetics of ruinlust appreciation, the politics of power (and its subversive counterpart), questions around censorship, preservation, authorship, aestheticisation and commodification, global socio-economic factors such as industrialisation, urbanism and the environment. The inclusions and remarks of the paper in the final chapter allude to a contemporary condition of perception that attempts to abstract some of the classic definitions, introducing new avenues of perspective that challenge persistent dogmatic interpretations and challenge the very order of humanity’s planetary survival in increasingly existential and critical terms. This viewpoint, that situates modern life in a state of existential ruin, has earmarked the propulsion of an eco-critical lens that encourages humanity to envisage itself as removed from the environments that they habitually reside and emptied out from any cultural gaze entirely. Where the conception of the ruin has historically been one that is observed through human eyes, increasingly this anthropocentrism has been thrown into a relative state of conceptual irrelevance. How might the landscape appear if we re-imagine it devoid of human occupation completely? Might the forces of capitalism, urbanism and modernity demand the ruination of physical space without some essential abstraction of thinking? Might in fact an ecologically sustainable future for the planet, one that includes humanity as a viably entangled collaborator, be better borne from the visualisation of a world already without us? In other words, might humanity better understand what is necessary for its continued existence exactly because of this un-imagining of the impact of its own destructive influence?