• 1 Gilles Clement, “Trzeci krajobraz” [The third landscape], trans. Marta Turnau, Autoportret 3 (2019) (...)
• 2 Matthew Gandy, “Unintentional Landscapes,” in Landscape Research 41 (4) (2016).
• 3 Aleksandra Brylska, “Radioaktywne kwiaty wiśni. Relacje Japończyków ze skażonymi obszarami wokół el (...)
• 4 Wolfram Höfer and Vera Vicenzotti, “Post-industrial Landscapes: Evolving Concepts,” in The Routledg (...)
• 5 Ingo Kowarik, “Cities and Wilderness. A New Perspective,” International Journal of Wilderness 3 (20 (...)

1The third landscape,1 the unintentional landscape,2 the disturbed landscape,3 the post-industrial landscape4 – these are arguably just some of the terms that address the peculiarities and diverse aspects of a landscape intensively transformed by human activity, especially industrial activity. Their multiplicity is indicative of the confusion created by attempts to capture the landscape after human impact. Are these landscapes post-natural? Post-human? Artificial? Sites of a “new wilderness”?5 Similarly, analogous questions arise not only in academic discourse, but also in culture, predominantly visual culture (primarily photography), albeit also in artistic projects and narrative genres, especially in recent years when the environmental crisis has become the triggering impulse. Here, I would like to approach this growing interest in the post-industrial landscape as a starting point for formulating several issues, most notably the question of how it is perceived by contemporary artists and for what reasons, and how, through cultural practices, they reconceptualize the experience and understanding of landscape.

• 7 I wrote more about the development of landscape research in the article “Krajobraz kulturowy. Międz (...)
• 8 Cf. Emma Waterton, “Landscape and Non-representational Theories,” in The Routledge Companion to Lan (...)

4The second source is non-representational theories, concepts that have emerged in cultural geography in response to the dominant constructivist approaches, to the excessive emphasis on texts and images.7 These highlight previously overlooked factors – embodied experience, the senses, affects, practices and actions, performative potential – emphasizing a way of approaching the landscape that discerns in it, as did Vincenz, something “more-than-representation.”8

• 9 I refer to the book Justyna Gorgoń, ed., Krajobraz zbudowany na węglu – intelektualna i artystyczna (...)
• 10 CUCO – curatorial concepts berlin e.V. “Tęsknota za krajobrazem – fotografia w dobie antropocenu” [ (...)
• 11 Henryk Waniek, “Rozszarpany krajobraz” [Torn landscape], Fabryka Silesia 3 (2013): 13.

5The landscape after transformation is primarily a consequence of at least partial withdrawal and reduction of development based on heavy industry and mining. However, in order to identify its complexity and multidimensionality more precisely, it is worth considering it on a longer time scale and based on the example of a particular type of landscape – the Silesian landscape. Following the political transformation, the Silesian landscape was the most rapidly transformed and, as a “landscape built on coal,”9 it arouses the greatest collective emotions, both locally and nationwide. Meanwhile, the introduction of the Anthropocene as a descriptive category for contemporary transformations triggered a search for new solutions, especially in the case of photography, which is considered to be the primary instrument for documenting Anthropocene transformations in the landscape.10 Consequently, the “ragged”11 landscape of Silesia, the region which was the first to confront industrialization and the first to enter, at least in part, the post-industrial stage, has become the most active area for documenting the transformation.

• 12 Cf. Joanna Żylinska, “Fotografia po człowieku” [Photography after the human], trans. Patrycja Ponia (...)
• 13 Krzysztof Jaworski and Wojciech Wilczyk, Kapitał w słowach i obrazach [Capital in words and images] (...)
• 14 Adam Mazur, „Święta wojna” [Holy war], in Wojciech Wilczyk, Święta wojna [Holy war] (Kraków: Karakt (...)
• 15 On the tradition of Polish landscape photography cf. Maciej Szymanowicz, “O kontekstach utrwalania (...)
• 16 On Polish topographic photography cf. Marianna Michałowska, “Czy istnieje “nowa topografia” w polsk (...)

6Nevertheless, ruins, including post-industrial ones, can sometimes be seductively picturesque, which is the reason for the contemporary popularity of the ruin porn trend.12 Photography of the Silesian landscape after the transformation had to deal with this challenge. One of the solutions was proposed by Wojciech Wilczyk in a long-term photographic project carried out since 1992 and presented over the course of time, among others, in the book Kapitał w słowach i obrazach13 [Capital in words and images], published together with Krzysztof Jaworski (2002), in the album Czarno-biały Śląsk [Black and white Silesia] (2004), and at the exhibition Postindustrial (2004). Adam Mazur calls the photographer a “landscape-revisionist,”14 a critical gesture referring in this case to the trend of landscape photography which was initiated by Jan Bułhak’s concept of “homeland photography” and its later continuations, oriented towards the aestheticisation of landscape.15 For Wilczyk himself, on the other hand, the point of reference is the intersecting areas of interest: the Silesian photography of Michał Cała and various currents of twentieth-century documentary photography, especially the New Topographics Movement.16

• 17 Wojciech Wilczyk is not only one of the most respected photographers, but also a poet, author of th (...)

7Contemporary topographic photography often focuses on the periphery and the remnants of modernization. Such was also the Silesian landscape in Wilczyk’s photographs – decaying, agonizing, abandoned on the periphery as a result of new economic processes and deindustrialization. One could sense its disappearance and emptiness – the absence of people, movement, action, activity, work – in the desolate spaces left behind by mines, steel mills, coking plants, zinc works. In fact, almost emptiness. Indeed, what Wilczyk could not officially and fully document photographically, he documented narratively.17 In the text “Czarno-biały Śląsk”, a topographical entry accompanying the album, he described his first trips to the “Walenty” coal coking plant in Ruda Śląska in 1992 and what followed apart from the later presented photographic frames:

• 19 Significantly, Henryk Waniek, in his essay on the transformation of the Silesian landscape, notes a (...)

8By recording this scene, Wilczyk suggests a counterpoint supplement to the photographic narrative – the biological, animalizing language emphasizes the close connection between the decay of industrial objects and the vitality of demolition, thus derivatively naturalizing both the industrial object and the process of destruction19. Post-industrial life after life, work after work, though, also reveals an alternative circulation of matter and an alternative economy of the unemployed, often former employees of bankrupt factories. Former industrial productivity is being transformed into a practice of a new type – post-industrial productivity, which is transforming the landscape with the same intensity. There is thus a further active life going on in it, although, due to its illegality, it is rarely documented (an important exception is the photographic series Biedaszyby by Arkadiusz Gola).

• 20 On the aestheticization of the photography of ruins, cf. Małgorzata Nieszczerzewska, Ruinologie. Ko (...)
• 21 Wilczyk, “Czarno-biały Śląsk,” 12.

9To the extent that photography does teach us how to see, Wojciech Wilczyk’s topographic record did so by de-emphasizing the “prettiness” of the view, aestheticizing the landscape of industrial ruins.20 Instead, he focused on disintegration and decomposition, yet not to expose its picturesque qualities or plunge us into the melancholy of transience and catastrophe, but to raise questions about the repressed consequences of political and economic transformation, about the shame provoked by unaesthetic industrialization, even though we are still, as he says, its beneficiaries.21 At the same time, he led us into an area beset with traps – both industrialization and its decline were becoming ambivalent processes. After all, the spectacular downfall of the socialist (and modern) myth of industrialization exposed the ruthlessness of the new myth as an economic necessity – that of deindustrialization. As well as an equally ruthless entanglement in the irresolvable conflict between social costs and ecological costs. Thus, the landscape featured in Kapitał and Czarno-biały Śląsk in its disintegrated material substance and alternative circulation of matter revealed, from today’s point of view, the contradictions in which we are embroiled as we face the effects of the first stage of decarbonization.

• 22 Adam F. Idziak, Lesław Teper and Wacław M. Zuberek, Sejsmiczność a tektonika Górnośląskiego Zagłębi (...)

11For Krzysztof Szewczyk, author of the photographic project Drżenie [Trembling] (2017), a landscape “built on coal” means more than just a visually accessible view or image. However, it does also feature a haptic dimension, resulting from ground shaking after mining operations, micro tremors, subsidence and landslides caused by the instability of the excavated ground. Mining tremors occur in Poland in three areas – in Silesia, near the Belchatow mine and in the Zagłębie Miedziowe (Copper Belt). Their scale is surprising: seismic stations record about 1.500 microshocks per year (in 2019 there were about 1.800), although the stronger ones noticeable on the surface are about three hundred per year. Predominant among them are induced tremors, arising from the disturbance of the natural state of geological equilibrium by coal mining, while anthropogenic seismicity is “a manifestation of the dynamic deformation of the rock mass under the influence of the ongoing exploitation of the deposit.”22

• 24 Ibid.

13Trembling is an exceptionally evocative and pertinent metaphor for the relationship between man and the post-transformation landscape, a symptom of both the feedback and mutual destabilization. It makes almost palpable the resonance, the waves of vibration flowing between the tectonic tremors of the earth, ripped through and hollowed out by tunnels, the vibrations of buildings, objects and human emotions. The trembling conditions bring together geology, matter, the operation of the mining industry and human reactions, thus pointing to interdependencies that can escape visual perception. What makes this aspect important is that shifting attention to the invisible or less visible dimensions of the landscape meant, for the photographer, focusing on what happens underground, researching the “hidden topography of the land.”24 The tools of research involved seismological maps marking the epicenters of underground tremors, and the method of work was walking in the footsteps of successive tremors. However, these often cannot be seen on the surface, even seismological maps pulsate with constant changes. Tremors are thus a condition that hardly lends itself to the rules of traditional photographic representation. Thus, Szewczyk’s project had to restrict itself to visualizing the surface, signaling at the same time the rupture, disjunction and desynchronization between the stability of the photographic frame, the tools for measuring seismic tremor (as a metonymy of epistemological order, knowledge and research) and the invisible geological tremors. After all, subterranean movements, though measurable, are uncontrollable, so the tremor also highlights the entanglement of causality – it is human activity, the extraction of minerals, that has thrown the earth out of geological equilibrium, initiating a process of destabilization; the seismic tremors themselves, however, are a dynamic response to these activities.

• 25 Cf. Marta Smolińska, Haptyczność poszerzona. Zmysł dotyku w sztuce polskiej drugiej połowy XX i poc (...)
• 26 Ibid, 320; see also Paul Rodaway, “Haptyczne geografie” [Haptic geographies], trans. Dorota Angutek (...)

14 By opting for trembling as a key metaphor and at the same time a physical state, Szewczyk reorientates the perception of the landscape, making visible its haptic dimension, or rather, its polysensory intertwining of relations, which can be combined with the extended hapticity proposed by Marta Smolinska, integrated and cooperating with other modalities, especially auditory and visual, but also with the sense of balance.25 Trembling is activating through the flow of vibrations a haptic resonance, which, together with the propagating waves, encompasses the full somatic sensation and creates a kind of synergistic union between touch, body balance and awareness of space.26 Let me just note in passing that exceptionally evocatively this haptic resonance, the synergistic fusion of the trembling Silesian earth with human and non-human reactions, was reported by Felix Netz in his novel Dysharmonia caelestis:

• 28 Mark Paterson “’W jaki sposób dotyka nas świat’: estetyka haptyczna” [“How the world touches us”: h (...)

15Haptic resonance, in turn, triggers affective reaction. This correlation was pointed out by Mark Paterson: “haptic orientation reduces the abstract distance generated by the gaze and accommodates the affective response.”28 Thus, affect – as sudden, violent arousal – circulates in a looped relationship between the earth’s energy discharge and human responses. There is another element to this looping: in the old seismology, light-sensitive paper was used to measure tremors. Szewczyk’s photographic project can – by analogy – be interpreted as an attempt to record affective tremor, and at the same time the difficulty of documenting it photographically, which always appears asynchronously, in delay.

• 29 On the post-mining landscape as an indicator of the Anthropocene see Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Wate (...)

16 Trembling as an entanglement of material effect and affect thus leads toward a view of the landscape that is close to non-representational theories. Here it most accurately defines the diverse manifestations of the Anthropocene landscape and its state of disequilibrium,29 when what is subterranean, geological (to some extent hidden, implicit, although caused by human interference and exploitation) sets in motion, vibrates what is on the surface and includes in haptic resonance the materiality of the excavated earth, human affects, somatic reactions and, finally, the fragile and violated foundations of life. Indeed, in such a perspective, microshocks cause equalization – the earth, bodies, objects become the same trembling matter.

• 30 Cf. Ugo Bardi, Wydobycie. Jak poszukiwanie bogactw mineralnych pustoszy naszą planetę [Mining. How (...)
• 31 David Howes, “Skinscapes. Embodiment, Culture and Environment,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance (...)

17The question of destabilization of the Silesian landscape and its anthropocenic character is also addressed by Michał Łuczak in a multi-phase project presented in part in the exhibitions Wydobycie [Extraction] (2018), Doświadczanie punktów. Nowy krajobraz śląski [Experiencing the points. The new Silesian landscape] (2018), Mgła [The fog] project and as part of the intervention Stopnie nachylenia [Grades of inclination] (2019) presented at the Silesian Museum (carried out jointly with Szymon Szewczyk). Each installment revolves around a common problem – “a landscape built on coal” and the consequences of its extraction, which pulsates with meanings as much as trembling.30 Nonetheless, the poster announcing the Wydobycie exhibition features the landscape not as a spatial frame, but outlined on a human body. Viewed from behind, a man’s head, neck and part of his bare back are covered with coal dust, arranged in black dots, streaks and spots on his skin. However, in other photographs of miners, the dust forms dark streaks, zones and bays on their bodies. One may seek an anthropological and cultural motivation for this analogy between the corporeal and terrestrial landscapes as perceived by David Howes in his concept skinscape.31 What seems more significant in this case, however, is the indication of the relationship of corporeal adjacency between man, his physical labor in the mine and coal. As well as a subversive reference to one of the oldest artistic techniques – sketches in charcoal, the traditional material of landscape drawing. Subversive because these landscapes on human skin are in fact the work of nature, the unintentional, spontaneous art of the earth, in which it is the earth itself that creates its material image, although they are also at the same time a literalised carbon footprint. Within this multiplied form (dirt-art), the haptic dimension of the landscape experience is also revealed. Coal dust is not something distant, it becomes a material imprint, dirt, and even more, its atomized particles (as respirable dust) penetrate skin barriers, enter the respiratory system and sometimes lead to pneumoconiosis, an occupational disease of miners.

• 32 Cf. Mateusz Chaberski, Asamblaże, asamblaże. Doświadczenie w zamglonym antropocenie [Assemblages, a (...)

18The photographs featured in the Mgła [The fog] exhibition, on the other hand, directed attention to one of the most obvious issues – air pollution by dust, from the burning of coal. What is perhaps most significant, the fog, like the tremors caused by underground upheaval, knows no boundaries, settles on bodies, along with the breath it penetrates inside organisms. Here, too, embodied experience is thus activated. However, the photographer problematizes the phenomenon itself, pointing not only to the “foggy” of the air, as the discourse and debate around the smog crisis is equally “foggy,” rendering certain and transparent knowledge impossible.32

• 33 Edwin Bendyk, Świat bez węgla [A world without coal], in Polski węgiel (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Kryty (...)
• 34 Aleksandra Kunce writes brilliantly about this dirtiness and tangibility of coal in the essay: Dotk (...)

20My intention was to strongly emphasize this distinctiveness of Łuczak’s perspective, because coal is usually considered one-dimensionally in the optics of the central critical discourse – it is now, as Edwin Bendyk points out, “public enemy No. 1.”33 In Silesia, on the other hand, in the last decade, since the 2013 exhibition Węgiel Boom!, it has become a kind of gadget, used for the post-industrial and design rebranding of the region, a raw material refined in processing as jewelry or cosmetic products. In this sophisticated form, be it a soap or jewelry, it loses its dirtiness, its connection to the earth, natural history, manual labor and its consequences, Łuczak, on the other hand, restores that primal dirtiness associated with the touch of coal.34 Thus, similarly to Szewczyk, he brings it out from the hidden level, from underground layers, shows its circulation on the surface or in the air as dispersed matter, atomized and circulating among organisms, at the same time directing our attention to the network of interdependencies between the geological and atmospheric dimensions of the landscape.

• 36 Materiality as a specific feature of the Silesian landscape is pointed out by Elżbieta Dutka in Dut (...)
• 37 Cf. “Upper Silesia is a Drach. A dragon. It is more than a metaphor. […] Drach’s body sometimes tre (...)

22The focus on the entanglements and metabolic circulation of animate and inanimate matter, organic and mineral, seems particularly pertinent to experiencing and understanding the Silesian landscape and firmly established in the region’s chthonic-geological imagination.36 Such mineral-geological-metamorphic flows of bios, zoe, thanatos and geos are, for example, the driving energy behind the narrative in Szczepan Twardoch’s Drach.37

• 38 Ewa Bińczyk, Epoka człowieka. Retoryka i marazm antropocenu [The age of human. The rhetoric and tor (...)
• 39 Cf. Derek Gladwin, “Eco-haptic Photography Visualizing Irish Bogland in Rachel Giese’s The Donegal (...)

23Thus, in the photographic practices and modes of vision of the new generation of Silesian photographers, what is revealed is not so much a committed rhetoric of intervention, breaking out of the marasm of the Anthropocene,38 or an accusatory critique, but an attempt to capture the complexity of transformative processes, less explicit and more oriented towards the search for interdependence. However, unlike Edward Burtynsky’s best-known photographs of the Anthropocene landscape, which operate with a monumentalism that gravitates toward the aesthetics of the sublime and the beauty of catastrophe, Szewczyk and Łuczak offer a more intimate yet multidimensional perception – they expand the visuality of the landscape to include haptics and a corporeal relationship with humans close to eco-haptic photography.39 Consequently, they reduce the distance – the landscape of the Anthropocene is not an image or view seen from afar, relegated to a safe distance, but something that penetrates, permeates, settles on the skin and lungs, is the trembling earth underfoot, the tilted house in which one lives, matter that vibrates and circulates. Thus, they make the threat real, opening up perception to affective responses.

• 40 Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia. A New Concept in Health and Identity,” Philosphy, Activism, Nature 3 (...)
• 41 I’m leaving aside the issue of diseases generated by the development of industry in Silesia, since (...)
• 42 Cf. CoCo, “Fotografia antropocenu,” 38.

24Therefore, in the case of Szewczyk and Łuczak’s projects, one can speak of bringing to the surface the emotions that accompany the transformation of the landscape, especially solastalgia. This is a term introduced by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, referring to the emotional reactions of people living in heavily transformed areas when their immediate surroundings no longer meet the criteria of a safe and secure location.40 Psychoterratic and somatoterratic disorders are induced by factors related to profound environmental changes, pollution, degradation of the residential landscape. Indeed, the projects of both photographers, who are biographically connected to Silesia, recognize this relational coupling, in which the erosion and destabilization of the land produces not only material consequences, but also the effect of eroding emotional and psychophysical stability.41 Solastalgia in this case assumes the form of a precipitate sense of balance and security, anxiety, fear, trembling, also a polarization between a strong identification with the Silesian landscape and place of residence and an awareness of living in an environment that is simultaneously threatened and endangered. Autobiographical experience, emphasized by both of them, also makes the internal point of view stronger, making the photographs not so much about the Anthropocene as deeply embedded in it,42 which is why the fragility of landscape, matter, life is so strongly visualized in them.

• 43 Marianna Michałowska, “Krajobraz krytyczny w polskiej fotografii – geografie peryferii” [Critical l (...)
• 44 Paweł Starzec, “Ślad w przestrzeni społecznej. Socjologiczne spojrzenie na ‘nową topografię’” [Trac (...)

25One more aspect of Silesian post-transition landscape photographs is important, namely their peripherality. Marianna Michalowska pointed to the role of photographs of peripheral places in the context of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, calling them “critical landscapes” as they are “not just about seeing the landscape, but about linking natural thinking with an awareness of the consequences of human action.”43 Indeed, their critical dimension stems from being located on the margins, and the “peripheral gaze,”44 makes one’s view sharper: as in the case of Wilczyk, who portrays the repressed, embarrassing (in the central and dominant perspective of the free market, of course) effects of deindustrialization, or as in the case of Łuczak, who presented the Mgła [The fog] exhibition during the Katowice climate summit, where the native, central narrative ignored the environmental and health effects of coal power.

• 45 Cf. Dutka, “Literackie krajobrazy Górnego Śląska,” 262–263.

26Wojciech Wilczyk’s Czarno-Biały Śląsk opens with a short prose piece by Andrzej Stasiuk – I tak to się wszystko kiedyś skończy [And so it will all come to an end one day]. In the writer’s narrative, there also appears, as in the photographs, a post-industrial landscape of decay and decomposition framed in a mortal and material metaphoric45:

• 50 Jacek Koźma, “Antropogeniczne zmiany krajobrazu związane z dawnym górnictwem węgla brunatnego na pr (...)

30The anthropogenic lakeland of the Muskauer Arc is an area on the Polish-German border where intensive mining of lignite (first by underground method, then by open pit), ceramic clay, quartz sands has been carried out since 1834.50 After the last mine closed in 1973, some of the degraded post-mining areas were subjected to reclamation, while spontaneous renaturalization processes are taking place in the remaining areas. They are already so advanced that a geopark was created at the site in 2009, which was listed by UNESCO in 2015.

• 51 Robiński, Hajstry, 203.
• 52 Clement, “Manifest trzeciego krajobrazu.”
• 53 Robiński, Hajstry, 207.

31However, Robinski does not travel to the Lake District to indulge in a fetishization of the disaster, and does not simply limit himself to providing a descriptive account of the contamination of the landscape. Rather, what intrigues him most is the phenomenon of the exceptionally high population of dragonflies in the area and the processuality of the landscape’s evolution after the cessation of mining. Indeed, the landscape of the Arc is only seemingly synchronous, with expeditions to particular places in the lake district revealing different stages in the natural history of the place.51 While the younger reservoirs are indeed contaminated and overly acidic, the older, century-old ones have already become neutralized and eutrophied. Nonetheless, even the acidified ones have proven to be an attractive biotope for rare dragonfly species. The narrative was thus guided to balance the effect of the landscape’s toxicity with its reverse – the evolution of the abandoned area into a natural refuge, a “third landscape.”52 And perhaps even more – Robinski builds the story in such a way as to eliminate the horror or fear reflex (usually produced when toxicity is experienced) and reveal the processuality of the post-disaster state – its particular temporality stretched over a long natural time, since the post-transformation landscape is always still in the process of transformation. The current (post-mining) transformation is not the only one, by the way, as the reporter further deepens temporality with a geological dimension, the landscape plowed through by quarries reveals older layers: “I reached my fingers into the wall of the heap and pulled out souvenirs from the Miocene. [...] In the Miocene forest from which the local lignite was formed, magnolias, ginkgoes, sequoias, cedars and cypresses grew. After several million years, a mere touch turned them into dust.”53 Significantly, one more time the perception of landscape shifts towards hapticism.

• 54 Ewa Bińczyk, Epoka człowieka, 118.

33In contrast, an unambiguously apocalyptic interpretive framework is proposed by Filip Springer in his reportage series Zmiana klimatu już tu jest. Podróż do przyszłości [Climate change is already here. Journey to the future] published in 2019 issue of the journal Pismo. Thus, each of them focuses on a different aspect of climate change, however one that clearly leaves its mark or even ravages the landscape: with the titles Noteć wysycha na naszych oczach, Śląsk – kraina katastrof, Czy zatrują nas wysychające torfowiska? [The Noteć River is drying up right in front of our eyes, Silesia – the land of disasters, will we be poisoned by drying peat bogs?] directly evoke further threats. In his perspective, all these phenomena are derivatives of human hyperactivity, so (according to the optics of the Anthropocene) it is possible to reverse the perspective and perceive in them not so much “natural” disasters, but post-natural ones.54

• 57 Cf. Bożena Gulla, Kinga Tucholska and Agnieszka Ziernicka-Wojtaszek, Psychologia kryzysu klimatyczn (...)

36Thus, for Springer, the anthropogenic landscape after mining operations is completely unnatural, post-natural, “fabricated.” However, the problem is not of aesthetic nature, although the reporter talks about landscape aesthetics. For him, the artificial landscape of the coal “open pit” is only a “cover”, a camouflage for the upcoming apocalypse. The objective of guiding the narrative in this way seems obvious: to provoke a reaction, to provoke a reflexive intervention, to free us from catatonia, so the reporter operates with a strategy of hyperbolization, the rhetoric of shock and the threat of catastrophe. However, most importantly, he activates emotions – those most emblematic of the psychology of the climate crisis, terror or panic, but also a sense of pretraumatic stress.57 Springer’s short reportage thus brings the Anthropocene into the heart of the debates – on the one hand the multiplied loss of nature, the future and the landscape, and on the other the overproduction of threatening emotions.

• 58 On the importance of the new vitalism for cultural geography and the non-representational perspecti (...)

37These are two radically different landscape narratives and two rhetorics. The first can be called vitalist (or neovitalist),58 stemming from the belief that nature’s spontaneous succession, its spontaneous reclamation potential and the spontaneous dynamics of rebirth will lead to the renaturalization of the post-industrial landscape. Thus, it tends to focus on the causality of the ecosystem, the adaptability – it is a landscape of double transformation, first anthropogenic, then natural, now most often referred to as the “third landscape” (Clement) or “fourth nature” (Kowarik). Meanwhile, the second rhetoric, the apocalyptic one, focuses on man’s destructive hyperspace, discerning only artificiality in the post-transformation landscape, with a stronger impact on the affective sphere. However, both of them enable us to see not so much an abstract idea or statistical data, but the material consequences of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene discernible in the geomorphology of the landscape. To put it differently, both narratives transfer a concept fraught with the risk of speculativeness to the geological concrete, available in experience.

• 59 Adam Rostański, “Wartość przyrodnicza zwałowisk odpadów poprzemysłowych” [Natural value of post-ind (...)
• 60 Joanna Bednarek, “Pełzająca katastrofa” [A creeping catastrophe], Widok. Teorie i praktyki kultury (...)
• 61 “Katastrofa klimatyczna to nie sezonowa moda. Rozmowa z Dianą Lelonek” [Climate catastrophe is not (...)

38Heaps are literally leftovers, rejects, mining and post-production waste, ashes, slags and dust. At present, they have become a phenomenon of exceptional complexity: they represent a threat to the environment due to the possibility of spontaneous combustion, from a biological perspective they are a kind of scientific laboratory, new species appear on them, such as the arbuscular fungus Rhizoglomus silesianum discovered on the partially unreclosed Makoszowy heap, with time they become refuges of local biodiversity59. The heaps are therefore overgrown with plants and become overgrown with meanings. Some of the more important ones were proposed by Diana Lelonek in her project Hałda rokitnikowa [Buckthorn slag heap], prepared in response to the Katowice Climate Summit. While it does not concern the Silesian heaps, it nevertheless remains embedded in transformational optics, as the artist, posing the question of what comes after coal, addressed the degradation of the landscape after the open-pit mines of the Konin Basin. The effect of mining is the desertification of these areas, with the Gniezno Lake District disappearing, riparian forests and rivers drying up, among other things. However, Lelonek focused not only on the apocalyptic dimension of the landscape’s “exploitation of the ecosystem,”60 but also on one of the main actors in the reclamation of these areas – sea buckthorn, which, as a particularly resistant plant, is found planted on post-mining spoil heaps. Albeit Lelonek calls it a post-apocalyptic species,61 it is essentially a pioneer species that strives on the front line, stabilizing the ground, preparing the soil for the next, more demanding plants.

• 62 “Postsztuka w czasach postnatury. Z Dianą Lelonek rozmawia Natalka Dovha” [Post-art in the age of p (...)

39The artist used a kind of imaginative and conceptual volte-face – the title of the project Hałda rokitnikowa [Buckthorn slag heap] transfers and shifts attention from the mining industry to the natural-environmental aspect of reclamation. Through this symbolic rebranding from coal to sea buckthorn, the plant becomes a starting point for rethinking the transformation. However, not the one that has already taken place (industrial) and not the one that is taking place (natural), but the next one, the social one, because, as Lelonek points out, she was interested in introducing the issue of “just transformation of the coal region” into the public debate.62 Thus, the answer to the question of what comes after coal is not just a life-giving plant, but also a different idea of the economic model. So the jars of sea buckthorn preserves, first prepared together with volunteers and then smuggled to the Katowice climate congress, are contraband from a different system. As she comments, sea buckthorn:

• 64 Ewa Domańska, “Sprawiedliwość epistemiczna w humanistyce zaangażowanej” [Epistemic justice in the e (...)

40Consequently, Lelonek does not limit herself to a critical perspective, but creates an alternative scenario for the future, not only in natural terms, but also in social, political or economic terms. She proposes a utopian solution realizing that the field of art is the area where such “real, local micro-utopias”64 of an even other more just transformation can be imagined and tested.

• 65 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Sztuki uważności” [The art of noticing], trans. Przemysław Czapliński, Teks (...)

41The discourse of the Anthropocene takes away the future, while Lelonek’s project allows this future to be witnessed, as it balances the ecocide perspective with a less catastrophic point of view, one that, however, does not lead to nostalgic or escapist pastoralism. This is not due to mechanisms of displacement, adaptation to catastrophe or other negation strategies identified by researchers, but to the conviction that apocalyptic rhetoric carries the risk of being counterproductive, for example due to habituation. Local micro-utopias are a different kind of mobilization for action because “neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collective survival.”65

• 66 Nicholas Mirzoef, Jak zobaczyć świat [How to see the world], trans. Łukasz Zaremba (Warszawa: Karak (...)

42The Anthropocene has triggered an unusually heavy fervor in the scientific sphere in almost all disciplines, the dizzying overproduction of theories, concepts, notions, nevertheless, results in them often circulating (despite the best intentions of the authors) in their own closed circuit. Should we consider that the role of culture is not only to diagnose, but also to translate abstract ideas into an idiom of concretizations observable in the experiential mode, the referenced photographs and narratives of the post-transition landscape enable us to “see” the Anthropocene as much, as postulated by Nicholas Mirzoef,66 as much as to realize its haptic proximity, its real, somaterratic and psychoterratic consequences, and the conjunctions and flows between the geological and the atmospheric, exploitation and its material impacts and affects.

• 67 Cf. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories,” E-flux Journal April 2 (...)

44In all the recognitions, though, the landscape after transformation is not merely a passive screen onto which the diagnoses and fears of the Anthropocene are projected, but also an active battleground of forces that transcend human manageability. It is a geological and metabolic landscape, imbalanced yet uncontrollable, endangered and threatening, material and affective, fragile and vital, revealing a heterogeneous temporality in which the deep time of natural history and the violent, destructive time of human exploitation are intertwined. Thus, in this non-obvious, agonized (post-natural and post-human at the same time) ontology, it regains its depth of dimensions (geological, temporal) and material substantiality, not only organic (humus, soil), but also mineral, inanimate. Due to this geontological67 extension, we become part of the landscape after transformation – its “trembling” matter.