106DIORAMASman’s indelible impact on the environment by littering the scene with signs
of the indiscriminate capitalist registers of production and consumption.
Here, humans’ absence suggests a lack of environmental commitment
and care, rather than indebtedness to and admiration for nature. The
dominion over unspoiled nature of classical dioramas is compromised—
the panoptic frame is maintained, but the power relation is altered. Here
there is nothing to tame, control, or aspire to. This type of scene troubles
the viewer in the implication that our relationship with nature is prob-
lematic and that humans’ actions toward the environment are often
reckless and inconsiderate. In “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Nicholas
Mirzoeff points out that “we now find ourselves confronting an autoim-
mune capitalism that seems determined to extract the last moment of
circulation for itself, even at the expense of its host lifeworld.”^1 No loca-
tion effectively stands outside the anthropogenic dimension, and the
landfill thus emerges as a politically charged site in contemporary repre-
sentation. Utterly ignored by official culture and thus ostracized from
philosophical discourses, the landfill was recently and controversially
brought to cultural attention by Slavoj Žižek, who argued that “the prop-
erly aesthetic attitude of the radical ecologist is not that of admiring or
longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather of
accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste,
of decay, of the inertia of rotten material that serves no purpose.”^2 The
landfill thus becomes a site of anthropogenic truths, one that we should
attempt to understand not solely on the grounds of shame and corrup-
tion but as a legitimate ecosystem produced by human/nonhuman econ-
omies. In opposition to the assertion of ecological ideologies that invite
us to reconnect with a pristine nature in which humans essentially have
no place, Žižek suggests that we should instead embrace our alienation
from nature as a pathway to different ethical responsibilities toward
waste.
In this sense, Dion’s diorama vacillates between the paternalistic ac-
cusatory dimension of classical ecological strategies and the possibility of
considering the landfill as an ecological biosystem of equal importance
to those celebrated by natural history rhetoric. On the grounds of this
ambiguity, Landfill simultaneously exposes the productive interconnect-
edness between human-generated pollution and animal life: the ability of
some animals to adapt to the dire conditions humans create and to thrive