How can the human-oriented category of a witness be reformulated so that it includes the non-human? Can the environment act as a witness to historical trauma? The questions of whether it is possible to comprehend the ways in which the earth's strata holds material substances of history and violence is central to the paper. The paper merges various theoretical perspectives and analysesnon-human witnessing through concepts derived from hauntology, forensic aesthetics and bioindication.Such modes of thinking functionin between two different philosophical approaches – a science-based, "objective" attitude towards the world we live in and metaphysics. By introducing hauntology, forensics and bioindication as three distinct ways of theorising the witnessing properties of the environment, the paper will aim to merge these two philosophical realms and set forth a way of thinking that refuses to stay on the beaten path of the traditionally understood academic theory-making. An analysis of landscapes as milieus accumulating the traces of the past in its flora, geological strata and architecture, as well as "haunted displays of haunted places and haunted people, that led haunted lives," [1] will focus on two different post-traumatic realities – the rural scenery of Poland and suburban groves of Southern United States.Analysing works of art by Wilhelm Sasnal, Wojciech Wilczyk and Steve McQueen, in which landscape plays the role of the main protagonist of either post-Holocaust or post-slavery actuality, the paper aims to show how artistic practice can shift our sensibility towards thinking about matter and non-human entities as agental forces capable of acting as witnesses to a wounded historical experience.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Caroll, „Restitutions to Nature's ghosts". In Theatrum Botanicum, ed. Uriel Orlow and Shela Sheikh (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018), 239
