Lost and Sensation: Embodied Encounters with Industrial Ruins in the Anthropocene

The contemporary life of industrial ruins has received significant academic attention in recent decades, along with widespread public interest, exemplified by the Urbex phenomenon. This paper focuses on contemporary postindustrial landscapes, where various types of ruins persist, endure, and accumulate. I turn my attention to the ruins in their current state and concentrate on the textures of their materiality, exploring how they enable us to confront large-scale phenomena, such as the ecological crisis, in a tangible way and ground abstract narratives like the Anthropocene (Armiero, 2021) through sensory encounters with their materiality. The paper is based on ethnographic research conducted in the Berguedà, a postindustrial and historically extractivist region in the Catalan Pyrenees (Spain). Drawing upon walking as a methodological tool (Careri, 2002; Sebald, 1995; Solnit, 2000), I examine the visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile experiences that arise from these material industrial remains, discussing how our interactions with them can stimulate a critical encounter with the self-destructive forces of the Anthropocene. The paper addresses how approaching the sociopolitical asymmetries of the ecological crisis, as evidenced by these ruins, can benefit from this sensory approach. Likewise, I explore the emancipatory potentials that these damaged, sensory-laden landscapes can evoke (Ahmann & Kenner, 2020; DeSilvey, 2020; Fly, 2021; Tsing et al., 2017). By attending to the sensory ambivalences they generate, I contribute to current debates on how they can challenge the illusions of modern capitalist progress (Berlant, 2011; Koselleck, 2004) and prompt critical reflections on habitability and our embodied relationship with damaged environments.