DIORAMAS107despite, or simply because of, humans’ alteration of the environment.
This is an example of the dark ecological loop characterizing the
Anthropocene—a loop that constantly brings the human back into the im-
age as a circular actant among others; a loop in which a human action is
always confronted by another, usually unpredictable, nonhuman coun-
termove. The image Dion creates makes us painfully aware that natural
history has methodically constructed its conception of nature and the
realism of ecosystems by selecting the ones that ventriloquize patriarchal
ideologies of strength and purity. In this sense, Landfill also points a finger
at the institution of the natural history museum and ecological marketing
for not acknowledging the importance and realness of these ecosystems,
thus contributing to the separation between nature and culture that so
greatly affects the anthropocentric attitudes of today.
The undoing of the rhetorical structures that define actual material
power in Landfill, as in an authentic natural history diorama, ultimately
rests upon the inclusion of taxidermy animals. In classical dioramas, the
undisputable material realism of hides and feathers predominantly served
to anchor the veridicality of an impossibly harmonious scene. The prem-
ise of the natural history diorama lay in its ability to materialize scenes of
uncontaminated nature that city dwellers might never encounter in their
lives. Dion’s Landfill appropriates this premise, paradoxically subverting
the concept of purity with that of decay and thus proposing another scene
that city dwellers usually do not (like to) see: the by-product fields at the
periphery of their own cities. From childhood, we are culturally trained
to care about our waste only until it reaches the trash can—the rest be-
comes invisible to us, enabling a dangerous game of delegation: Our re-
sponsibility toward waste might extend to sorting different materials for
recycling, but we are thereafter visually and ethically disconnected from
the impact of our personal waste on the planet.
Through these operations Landfill subverts the important notion of de-
corum on a number of levels. First, the setting does not comply with the
prescriptions of classical art, nor with those of natural history dioramas,
which are derived from classical art. In classical art, stagings were chosen
very carefully—landscapes and cityscapes were traditionally constructed
as elegant backdrops anchoring the stories of all-important humans who
fought, won, and conquered. But there is no purification at play in Dion’s
diorama—if anything, the artist deliberately takes the opposite way, and