Paesaggi di resti. Fatiscenza e incanto negli Stati Uniti del Sud di William Eggleston e Cormac McCarthy

The research focuses on the contemporary landscape of the southern United States and how it can be experienced aesthetically. Following the transformations undergone by the landscape in the capitalist and post-capitalist eras during the second half of the 20th century, the increasingly evident emergence of a landscape of ruins, dotted with the debris of a broken civilisation, came to light. The mixture of fascination and terror that the 'Deep South' immediately evokes is the complex result of a layering of narratives that, over time, have fuelled a particular perception of these places. Two authors have contributed decisively to shaping the contemporary geographical and symbolic imagination of the southern United States (from the 1970s to the present day), with a particular focus on the landscape: Photographer William Eggleston (Memphis, 1939) and writer Cormac McCarthy (Rhode Island, 1933–Santa Fe, 2023) draw on the photographic and literary heritage of these regions to create a detailed cartography of the 'new' South. Through their mutual intertwining, photography and literature develop new visual and narrative alphabets, and cannot be considered separately from one another. The shared archaeological process of 'excavating' words and images results in a kind of metaphysics of ultimate things, which calls into question the conditions that make a relationship with a landscape populated by spectres and ghosts possible. In this landscape, every distinction between the real and the imaginary, the visible and the invisible, is suspended.