Fear and Fascination: Anti-Landscapes between Material Resistance and Material Transcendence

Abstract

This article examines the mechanisms that turn landscapes into anti-landscapes: projection, material interference, and ideological contradiction. Landscape and anti-landscape are dialectical twins; whereas landscape affirms cultural and aesthetic values, anti-landscape negates them through material resistance. This negation creates a sense of material transcendence, the aesthetic appeal through understanding that the world is larger than the projections onto it. Negation and material transcendence is the common denominator for anti-landscapes such as the exclusion zone around Chernobyl and the “feral houses” of the American suburb.