Absence, Presence, and Mobility

Abstract

This article works at the intersection of mobilities and landscape studies. It shows absence-presence as a principal means by which mobilities are related to landscape, thus enabling the concept of landscape to be elaborated with regard to the politics of community, the ways in which embodied practices manifest themselves and create place, and the intertwinement of the cultural and the natural. To elaborate the conceptual argument, the article presents the case study of a planned but never fully realized high-speed tramline running through a residential area of Tallinn, Estonia. To explore the multiple absences of what was planned and the presence of imagined and a few realized landscape elements, the article makes use of artistic works, such as a skiing performance of infrastructure re-creation (Invisible Tramline).