Dylan Trigg:
Aesthetics of Catastrophe: on Nostalgia and Dead Malls

How does a place supposedly devoid of memorable qualities become a focal centre of nostalgia? The question is critical because it not only concerns how we conceive of the embodied experience of the world, but also how phenomenology, as a method often deployed to study the relation between memory and materiality, sets about its investigations without determining its results in advance. In this talk, I pursue this question through the case study of a nostalgia for shopping malls. To unpack this, the talk unfolds in three stages. First, I outline how the urban landscape has been characterised in evaluative terms within the history of human geography, not least in terms of place and placelessness. Contesting the divisions employed in this evaluation, I then turn pursue a phenomenological analysis of a nostalgia for a shopping mall in a state of partial dereliction. Finally, I consider how the concept of atmosphere can best capture the nostalgic transformation of place, in the process issuing a challenge to the idea that the character of place can be determined in advance.

Dylan Trigg is an FWF Senior Researcher at Department of Philosophy, Central European University, Vienna and faculty member of the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy. He earned his PhD at the University of Sussex (2009). He has also been a visiting scholar at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Art and Design and University of Duquesne, Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center. He is the author of several books including Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety (2017); The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror (2014); and The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny (2012). With Tobias Becker, he is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia (2024). His research interests include phenomenology, embodiment, medical humanities, and aesthetics. His work has been translated into several languages including German, Russian, French, Japanese and Chinese.