Paysages d’Après | After-scapes | Paisagens do depois

26-27 May 2025

Sala D. Pedro V

School of Arts and Humanities, University if Lisbon

We are interested in looking at after-scapes, and what landscapes are, look or feel like, after: After departure, after a war, after destruction, possibly after it no longer even qualifies as a landscape. The aim is to re-inscribe the temporal, and specifically the future dimension, into the understanding of landscape.

There are several axes to our reflection:

• War landscapes: what is the relationship between war and landscapes? Certes, war has always caused devastation in all areas; it does however appear increasingly like destroying the means of livelihood and the relationship to a land or an environment might be the very aim of war. The newly-appeared term of ecocide reflects just such a possibility. What do afterscapes tell us about our contemporary polity, and about contemporary warfare?
• Ruins and the specificity of landscapes of ruins. This has been a long-standing favourite object of landscape art, from the 18^th onwards. What do ruins tell us about our relationship to the world, and to our past and present identity?
• The Role of Capitalism in producing its own ruins, and specific post-capitalistic landscapes. What do post-capitalistic landscapes look like?
• Experiences of Loss of Landscape: What happens when a landscape disappears? The recently-coined term of solastalgia tries to encapsulate this specific and singular loss of a mode of being-in-the-world – or loss of a world. How are we to apprehend it, phenomenologically?
• The Importance of Afterscapes in Fiction: The notion of apocalypse, or a world without any recognisable landscapes, plays an important role in contemporary (science-)fiction. What does it say about our political and social modernity?
• Contrary to a common stance which views landscape as an a-temporal “slice-in-time” scenery, landscape studies have recently emphasised its temporal aspect: be if because of the time it takes to create one, or how landscape, as a lived experience, can only exist and be created over time, by a community (cf. European Convention of Landscape). But such a temporal dimension need and should not be confined to the past: a landscape is geared towards creating a future.
• Afterscapes are thus not necessarily a gloomy, desolate affair: they can also be seen as a positive aftermath of an era too concerned with conservative, stuffy, orderly landscapes, an always-already-past iconography of a golden era. Afterscapes can also be a new form of thinking the landscapes in mobility, as a form of empowerment, and a progressive conception of a community’s relation to its environment.

Provisional Program

DAY 1: The End of Landscapes?

Introduction

Panel 1: War Landscapes / Ruins

Landscapes of War; The Destruction of Landscapes as the Very Object of Warfare

Panel 2: Ecocide, The Wastes of Modernity: Wasting Modernity?

How Our Contemporary World Has Created Spaces of Desolation, Anti-Landscapes

DAY 2: The Aesthetics and Politics of Afterscapes

Panel 3: The Art of After-scapes and Apocalypses

Looking at After-scapes as Aesthetic Possibilities. How Has the “World After” Been Imagined and Represented?

Panel 4: The Landscape Is Yet to Come

“After after-scapes”: How Can a Common Future be Re-built, Re-imagined, in the Midst of Ruins, Waste and Unlivable Environments?