Configurations of Air: Matter, Traces and Making a Landscape

In episode three, Susan Mathews continues her conversation with Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024). Mădălina works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. Please listen to the first part of this conversation in episode two to hear about the need for a holistic view of our immersion in the atmosphere, thermic auras, and multisensory perception as the basis for empathy. 

Our conversation began with tornadoes, their radical dynamic form that makes air visible and creates a figure that is both perfect and dangerous, an ambivalence which diverges from the classical experience of beauty as harmony. There are other figures of the sky like clouds, lightning and the rainbow, but Mădălina was drawn to the tornado’s uncontrolled genesis and evolution as it challenges the assumption of the Anthropocene that humans can manipulate and domesticate everything. 

She spoke of the limitations of equating materiality with solid matter. Water and air are also material, as are light and other electromagnetic waves, radiation and other phenomena. Mădălina invites a shift not just of how matter is conceptualized, but of the traditional representation of matter as something passive that can be manipulated by humans to instead recognise that we are not the only form of matter who can be assigned activity or agency. 

The conversation then moved on to an interrogation of the human fixation on landscapes. Mădălina introduced the concept of landscapability to capture our tendency to compose, through analogy, a landscape even when land may not be present, say on the Arctic ocean as we are surrounded by air, water and ice. She also highlighted the values conveyed within our definition of landscapes, including emotional value such as patriotism, of topophilia. This theory of landscapes is also contextually informed by its origins in landscape painting in Italy and central Europe—a theory emerging from a different culture would not have the same principles. For example, one formed in the Amazonian forests would not have the particular principle of panoramic views. 

Mădălina’s study also includes work on the tactile aesthetics of cityscapes. A city is full of microclimates. On a hot summer day, you can enter a building and experience shadows and, in the last century, air conditioning. A glass houses can cultivate tomatoes earlier than the climate outside allows. This lack of a monotonous thermic landscape is a performance of civilization but so is paradoxically the creation of blandscapes such as shopping malls. The question of how to cope with and mitigate the consequences of climate change is not only for philosophers, but for architects and urban planners. The solution is not to build more capsules for a select group who can afford them; we need to develop strategies of common survival. 

Finally, we discussed the idea of traces. Mădălina spoke of how a trace is a kind of material signature left by someone or by something. They are not ruins but remainders. Traces are present, while also suggesting an absence. Some traces are more enduring than a life itself. Waste is also a trace, though an unwanted one. Some of these waste traces are incontrollable and some, like radioactive waste, are indestructible. 

Mădălina closes by urging us to pay attention to the things that surround us in everyday life, all worthy of our time and attention, that could open the doors of our perception to truly atmospheric living.

This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. 

More about the guest:

Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work here.