The F Landscape. Preflooded Wetlands

Unexpectedly apropos of the previous post, Liam Young of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, together with Darryl Chen, has created a series of quite beautiful images called "Postcards from a Green Future" – one of which, seen above, uses the Maunsell Sea Forts as a gantried foundation for suburban anti-flood design in an idyllic southeast England.

The entire suite of images is almost farcically green – it's sustainability redone as Grand Guignol. These speculative scenes of "a green future" show us an over-the-top, solar-powered utopia of detached single-family houses and wind turbines, woven together with light rail and renewable energy technologies; it's an Eden of sprawl spreading out into London's most distant scattered cityscape. 

(from tje fabulous BLGBLOG)

The Fucking Landscape in Laos

During the Vietnam War, the US flew more than 580,000 bombing missions over Laos, equal to one bombing mission every 8 minutes around the clock for 9 full years. In fact, the country's Xiengkhouang Province, where the famous Plain of Jars is located, is considered the most heavily bombed place on earth. This intensive bombing campaign left the landscape pockmarked with craters from PRUNED). 





While the pool may no longer be filled with water, many of these craters are permanently inundated, forming an aberrant hydrology of micro-lakes. In fact, some of them have been converted into aquafarms. Here's a photo of one of those fish ponds. In the south of neighboring, similarly pockmarked Vietnam, according to Places, “bomb craters are favored sites for houses, with a replenishable source of protein at the doorstep.”




In any case, the Klimt-like pattern of these circular craters embedded into a tapestry of rice fields may be mesmerizing to look at, nevertheless, these aerial photos belie the fact that millions of unexploded bombs remain on the ground, all posing a deadly threat to civilians. There are still millions of silent craters waiting for that human touch.
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The Fucking Landscape: The Fucking Hell by Jake and Dinos Chapman

In mostra al museo veneziano di Punta della Dogana (di Tadao Ando), il “Maledetto inferno” dei fratelli Chapman è composto da una serie di diorami di incredibile potenza sulle mille immagini del dolore e della morte. Delirio dell’atrocità nazista, l’inferno è comunque una fastosa celebrazione del superuomo che vive, e soffre oltre l’immaginabile, non dopo la morte, che sarebbe inesatto, ma DURANTE la morte, intesa come stato finale e permanente.

I diorami dei Chapman sono un capovolgimento dell’ideale idillico, edificante, pacificato e consolatorio che circonda come un’aureola la parola “paesaggio”. I loro criminali diorami nazisti ci ricordano (vedi Brueghel o Boecklin) che, quando è maledetto da Dio e dagli uomini, il paesaggio maledetto è uno strumento meraviglioso e potentissimo. Si dice che ogni giardino sia sempre una rappresentazione dell’Eden, ma è bello pensare che qualche volta possa essere anche una rappresentazione di un angolo d’inferno.