OASE93

This article discusses two recent films that address processes of landscape transformation in Europe: Alpi by Armin Linke and Robinson in Ruins by Patrick Keiller. Both films emerge form a transdisciplinary context and work at the intersection of ethnographic and artistic practices. The films combine forms of storytelling with a more neutral documentary gaze, showing the distance between the seeming rationality of the global networks by which these territories are affected and the apparent contradictions within the ensuing landscape transformations. The paper argues that the explicit choice for artistic modes of representation succeed in constructing a common language that makes the often immaterial territorial transformations tangible, transforming these immaterial process into possible matters of local concern. Alpi and Robinson in Ruins find the means in the artistic field to construct an alternative relationship with the ongoing transformation of landscape, one that is simultaneously disillusioned and engaged, and the films open up new landscape imaginaries that are simultaneously past and future oriented, local and global.