If landscape can be read, we may consider it as the inscription of those actors who have impressed their marks upon it, transforming it. The succession and evolution of actors and their actions over time upon a single geographic site shape the construction and mutation of landscape, often reconfiguring it entirely.
The word palimpsest — from the Latin palimpsestus, derived from the Greek παλίμψηστος palímpsēstos, "to scrape again": pálin (again) + psēn (to scrape, to rub) — involves the sense of deliberate erasure, hence its possible relationship with ruins resulting from premeditated destruction, or even abandonment. This is not a matter of layered superimposition, but rather the vestigial and fragmentary persistence of a certain reality, once constituted, upon a territory (the substrate of writing, of action, of scene) and therefore still present.
It further suggests a reading of new use, a newly inscribed scene, emerging from what stands built, established, and represented in today's inhabited landscape, where other social, cultural, economic, and physical realities once held sway — other historical contexts and meanings that somehow remain, like ruins and other remnants of former times. Understood thus, the concept serves as a valuable resource in studying and imagining the Anthropocene landscape.
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro