Una sublime devastación. Reflexiones en torno a las ruinas del siglo XX en Manufactured Landscapes (2006) de Jennifer Baichwal.

Abstract

In this essay we’ll sketch out a research on a contemporary display of the landscape in ruins: dwelled by the skeletons which were symbol and banner of the twentieth century’s progress and which now lie in pieces. This landscapes became the poetic motive of the essay-film Manufactured Landscapes(2006), in which the filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal follows the steps of the photographer Edward Burtynsky in a journey across landscapes devastated by the industrialization. We would like to see this film through the view of the aesthetic of the sublime in Nature, defined by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment(1790), but whose echoes could be traced down until our days. Andreas Huyssen (2006) believes that the aesthetic appreciation of ruins is no longer possible in our time, because ours is a culture of renewal and restoration, recycling or destruction. In which way, we wonder, do we appreciate aesthetically the ruins of our time? And in which way does this appreciation display in the contemporary audiovisual medium?