Contemporary Regimes of Visuality: The Avatar Mountains

In recent decades, academic conceptions of landscape have been progressively shifting away from a representational definition, according to which landscapes are reduced to scopic fictions aligned with the sensitivities of beholders, towards a substantive understanding that highlights their aesthetic, ecological, and socio-political dimensions. This ongoing turn has promoted more holistic and more- than-representational approaches that emphasise the interconnections between the perceptual and the environmental layers of landscape experience. At the same time, mobility practices (especially tourism) driven by the prior circulation of digital images foster a new reduction of places to the ‘horizons of expectation’ shaped by such imagery. Without adopting a technophobic stance, this article examines the risks implicit in modes of landscape consumption that disregard their inherent complexity. Focusing on Zhangjiajie Forest Park in China, it analyses how cinema and digital media have transformed this natural landscape, highlighting both the merits of this remediation – in terms of enhanced visibility and economic development – and its drawbacks, notably the encouragement of unsustainable practices such as overtourism and the aestheticisation of natural beauty