Socioplastics 11925 SolastalgiaWound
Displacement can begin while a person remains at the same address. The landscape that gives a home meaning may become damaged, unfamiliar or inaccessible. SolastalgiaWound names this situated rupture between an inhabited place and the conditions that once made it sustaining. It connects environmental change with attachment, memory and the everyday difficulty of documenting loss when no single departure marks its beginning. Glenn Albrecht introduced solastalgia to describe distress associated with environmental change in a person’s home environment. Rob Nixon examines slow violence and environmental harm that unfolds across time. Val Plumwood’s environmental philosophy and Anne Whiston Spirn’s work on landscape language offer ways to study how places are interpreted and altered. Their approaches help connect individual experience with material and political processes. A community could document changes to a familiar landscape through photographs, oral histories, environmental measurements and records of access. Repeated visits would show how erosion, contamination, extraction or loss of vegetation affects daily practices. Participants could identify which features carry memory and what conditions now limit use. The record would place personal accounts alongside the processes changing the site. SolastalgiaWound gives environmental research a vocabulary for place-based loss while people remain in place. It supports documentation that links attachment with observable changes and the decisions shaping them. The marker can inform planning, ecological restoration and public memory by showing how landscape injury affects everyday life. Its analysis follows both the changing environment and the relationships through which people experience home.
REFERENCES
Albrecht, G. et al. (2007) “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change”, Australasian Psychiatry, 15(sup1), pp. S95–S98.
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Plumwood, V. (2002) Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge.
Spirn, A.W. (1998) The Language of Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html