Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Practices of rewilding—ambiguously invoking the entanglement of wilderness and wildness—desire to re-form natural places, preventing domestication (i.e., a close familiar relationship between predators and humans) through the restoration or reintroduction of apex predators and keystone species. Rewilding enacts the possibilities offered by images of wilderness as pristine, self-regulating and self-perpetuating. Images of wilderness, on the one hand, perpetuate binary relations between nature and culture, the human being alienated by the otherness of wilderness and therefore able to see himself as an Other, while, on the other hand, highlighting the cultural practices of making and form-giving necessary to the delineation of such places. As opposed to wilderness, wildness is an affective excess of place, not in relation to nature or culture, elicited as the radically amorphous and unaccounted for in those relations formed through practices of place-making. Thinking through the entanglement of wilderness-as-image and wildness-as-affect, practices of rewilding and the formation and maintenance of the United States National Parks System, this paper is a study in how Nature is made ‘American.’ In this sense, is ‘American’ less an ethnos than an ethos that informs how we relate to Nature? Scientific practices like those of rewilding, everyday practices such as hiking, and representational practices that treat nature aesthetically, relate through these negotiated modes of image-making. This paper, then, considers how these practices make images from which Nature emerges both as an experience and as a form of scientific and cultural knowledge.