Ghosts in the gas. The restoration of the invisible in a film about the post-industrial landscape of Indonesia

Abstract

This article exposes the connections between the construction of an epistemology of aesthetics as a general theory of perception and the imaginary of post-industrial landscapes and ruins as they stemmed from the production and shooting of an ethnographic film. The film was shot in the region of North Aceh, in Indonesia, an extractive area now depleted. The author analyses how she came to question her own post-industrial aesthetics and chose a film as a means of rendering. She argues that only a team work could produce an ethnography of the emotional landscape that she and her co-researchers came across and lead them to see the spectral or immaterial dimension of the relationship between gas, the civil conflict which devastated Aceh for thirty years (1975-2005) and the visions of the future.