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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Chernobyl and dis-emplacement (Matthew Gurney)

The consideration of Chernobyl in ‘Sonderweaving and the Sonderweb’ reminded me of my own concept of dis-emplacement. The Sonderweb is defined in the chapter as “the intra-connected web of human and parahuman beings” which are “equally vivid, complex and important [to] the ongoing co-emergence of each other”. This made me think that that there is an overlap in the boundaries of the sonder-web and dis-emplacement, that they intra-act with each other. Where the Sonderweb is the “intra-connection” of the human and the para-human, dis-emplacement is the places, or non-places, inhabited in the Sonderweb. Furthermore, her description of human eyesight being more drawn to straight lines than organic shapes reminded me of my own concept, depth blindness, in terms of spaces, and the flora that create these spaces as being imperceivable to the anthropogenic eye. Her consideration inspired me to research literature based around the catastrophe, where I found the work of Liubov Sirota. In her poem ‘At the Crossing’, her imagery calls to mind not only the images of a natureculture that is non-referential, as described by the Sonderweb, but also a dis-emplacement of humans beyond nature and culture. Her poem exists in the boundary of these e-concepts.

While behind a quiet fence
on a bench in someone's garden
Doom weighs
a century of separation
on the scales.

This describes dis-emplacement of humans in-between the boundaries of life and death, but also an intra-action between them. Their lives are being weighed up and “on the scales” in such an ordinary setting, but also enveloped and involved in it through intra-action. This makes me concerned about what happens when the humans are forced to interact with the para-human by their environment, natural or unnatural.

Link:
https://elisaviettaritchie.com/elisavietta_translates_liubov_sirota.html

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2. Athabasca Oil Sand (Matthew Gurney) Reading the close reading in ‘Marginal Worlds’ made me think about anthropogenic environments that do not fit in the binary of nature and culture, places “caught in a sort of a halfway point between the two”. Worlds like this also exist beyond the marginal: they exist out of the limelight, where human existence, and our imaginations, do not dwell. It is as if they exist in a dark, other world, beyond anthropocentric focuses of the natureculture. The image is a flock of Canada Geese flying over a surface mine in the Athabasca, Canada oil sands. This environment is clearly unnatural and yet uninhabitable for humans too, subverting natureculture – there is no culture in this land, it is turned up and destroyed to preserve a culture that is spatially far away. The mining companies have not thought of what this means for the geese. It is hard to imagine what these birds perceive of their world, it can only to them be an uneasy, hostile expanse. These sorts of images make me think what will exist in these empty spaces, and what the significance of empty expanses like this are in the future.

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