Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

This thesis explores critical artistic interventions that engage with and materialise the complexities of diaspora and displacement—of both people and objects. It examines how such interventions reshape landscapes marked by imperialism, war, and genocide, focusing on the relationship between ruination, representation, and representatives, through what I term re-placement: the symbolic and material return or reappearance of landscapes.

Focusing on the work of artists Yael Bartana and Michael Rakowitz, the thesis analyses how visual, narrative, and material practices rework histories of destruction and diaspora. Through these interventions, landscapes are re-placed—emerging in new forms that connect with social and collective memory. I understand this process as a reframing of the real, which allows for the exploration of alternative topologies, spatialisations, and territorialisations—understood here as the ways in which space is structured, imagined, and transformed.

These artists intervene in landscapes of ruination by offering symbolic representations—such as the imagined return of a Jewish Europe in Bartana’s work—and by producing new material representatives, as seen in Rakowitz’s reappearances of ancient palaces. As I argue throughout the thesis, these interventions are not mere substitutions for what has been lost, but invocations of presence that insist on visibility and continued contestation. In doing so, they provoke a critical rethinking of the place and meaning of landscape itself.

This provides a foundation for engaging broader theoretical debates about landscape—particularly how landscapes are re-placed following ruination. What are these transformations of space? How do they come about? And how can we understand them conceptually? I argue that the re-placement of landscape through the work of art reveals something fundamental about the politics of presence, visibility, and repair.

This is significant for cultural geography, as it moves beyond viewing artists as merely observing, documenting, or depicting landscape, positioning them instead as active agents in its reshaping.