Cyprien Gaillard infuses his work Real Remnants of Fictive Wars II (2004) with an expression from the polymath geographer and romantic philosopher Alexander von Humboldt: the “living breath of nature” (lebendiger Hauch der Natur). In this video, mist emerges from a railway tunnel nestled between steep rocks. Although the mist appears to be a natural phenomenon, Gaillard actually used fire extinguishers to create this thick white smoke that slowly obscures the landscape before dissipating and revealing it once again. The mystery of smoke—its illusory nature—generates a particular sublimity: a quest to understand planetary processes and events that escape visible logic.

Naturgemälde, a German term translating to “landscape painting,” refers to the systematic representations of nature Humboldt developed to illustrate the encounter between the scientific and quantifiable presentation of the natural world and the awe provoked by its power. In Views of Nature: or Contemplations on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation, Humboldt introduces the concept of the sublime as a sensory experience mediated by observation, aesthetic experience, and hard science. ⁵ If the sublime dates back to 19th-century painting—to the purity and idealization within it more than the experience of it—then its representation becomes a fictional construction. But what happens when we seek to experience the vertigo that emerges between that which is human and the mysteries of natural phenomena? Where is the line between fiction, idealization, and the sublime?

Some artists, like Francis Alÿs, challenge these aesthetic limits and states of rapture not only by seeing or hearing, but through extreme means, like entering the eye of sand tornado. In Tornado (2000–2010), Francis Alÿs documents his repeated attempts to enter the eye of small tornadoes that form in the Milpa Alta region on the outskirts of Mexico City. His performative gesture—walking toward and through chaos—operates as a metaphor for human folly in the face of the sublime: an insistent search for meaning amidst disorder. Born from a misunderstanding about Don Quixote and windmills ⁶ , the work suggests that the impulse to challenge natural forces—like the tornado—compares to the often-senseless pursuit of ideals: a fiction in and of itself.

Understanding ecology, its mechanics, and its processes allows us to encounter the beauty and power of the landscape. Humboldt also used the term Naturgemälde to describe his vision of nature as a unified and interconnected whole. This concept underscores his belief that everything in nature is linked, and that observing the image reflected in the mind is key to discovering its greatest sublimity. We can, then, trace the anthropocentric—and, no doubt, colonial—legacy underlying the concept of the sublime: a human and individual experience traversed by power dynamics, domestication, and fiction.

Myth, as a narrative layer within fiction, reinforces these constructions. Beyond its fabled dimension, it is a story starring divine or heroic characters, situated outside historical temporality. In Terra non descoperta (The More Things Change) (1991), Alfredo Jaar revisits the chronicles of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, written in 1492. The work, composed of three light boxes and a series of photographs, connects two moments: the diary entries from October 13th and 15th and December 23rd, 1492, which capture Columbus’s desire to find gold—a founding myth of colonization—and photographs from 1985 of the mines in Serra Pelada in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. These images are mounted on mirrors framed in gold leaf. Jaar contrasts colonial ambition with its contemporary legacy: the exploitation of racialized bodies and territories in the present.

The L’Ichthyosaure (the ichthyosaur) (2003) by artist Mark Dion is a life-size replica of a sea creature lying on a staged beach. From its open belly spill objects associated with both paleontology and obsolete and contemporary technologies. These materials, scattered on the sand, surround the figure of the prehistoric animal as if time had collapsed around its body. The ichthyosaur—whose name means “lizard fish”—is a fossil creature identified between the 18th and 19th centuries, which exhibits traits similar to those of fish, reptiles, and aquatic mammals such as dolphins. The ichthyosaur’s biological ambiguity continues to challenge dominant taxonomies of the natural order and sparked debates among naturalists, creationists, and evolutionists even before the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. In the work of Dion, an American artist, the diorama becomes a medium for displaying natural history—mineral, plant, and animal—as a cultural product. His interest is not nature itself, but how individual and collective ideologies get embedded in its presentation.

In Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, Donna Haraway analyzes the racial, colonial, and gender dimensions that shape dioramas of African landscapes, as well as the taxidermy of primates and other species in the Carl Akeley African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. A diorama, Haraway notes, encapsulates, on the one hand, the spectacle of the natural order, the hunt, and the death of the animal, transformed into a “vivified stuffed animal”, ⁷ exhibited in institutions largely dedicated to eugenics; on the other hand, it functions as a machine of meaning: “[…] maps of power, arrested moments of social relations that in turn threaten to govern the living.” ⁸

Dion identifies this historical moment as a rift in the evolution of natural history: the ichthyosaur is not so much the object of the exhibition as it is a vanishing point that allows us to consider how science and knowledge evolve through questioning. It is no coincidence that, as Haraway reveals, “both science and popular culture are intricately woven of fact and fiction.” ⁹ By emulating 19th-century museums, his installation suggests that the apparent “facts” or fictions presented in these spaces are always conditioned by the beliefs of the society that produces them.

The sculptural installation Occidental Restraint (2005–2009), by Matthew Barney, is a derivative of his film Drawing Restraint 9, created in collaboration with Icelandic singer, songwriter, and actress Björk. For Barney, film generates sculpture: mythological and chimerical scenes in which performance is implicit, even when there is no apparent action. This speculative narrative, about whaling in Japan, articulates two stories: the cultural roots of this practice—despite international restrictions—and history of extraction in the North Atlantic, in which whale blubber was used as a basic industrial resource for the rise of the American economy between the 17th and 19th centuries. This material—used to make candles, soaps, and lamp fuel—is intertwined with Barney’s conceptual corpus, especially with his interest in petroleum jelly, petroleum, and other substances that connect body, industry, and desire.

An anthropophagic and non-human relationship can be observed in Occidental Restraint: Western characters invited to dinner in a traditional Japanese house eat with their hosts before transforming into whales and diving into the sea. This gesture signals a metabolic and erotic process between lovers, species, and landscape. The ascending “spine” of the sculptural masses suggests a fusion of bodies, a continuous movement between matter, emotion, and repulsion. This ambiguous space—between tenderness and grotesqueness—is characteristic of Barney’s explorations of modern global history and its material fictions.

The image is deceptive. And sometimes, art needs to be deceptive to say something. In Flare (2002), artist Thomas Demand presents a series of twenty-eight photographs showing how sunlight progressively passes through the leaves of a tree. The sky changes color in this seemingly everyday scene—the kind one might observe while lying in the shade. However, this work is a meticulous lie: Demand constructs life-size sets made entirely of paper and cardboard, which he then photographs. What we observe is not the sun filtering through the branches of a forest, but the glow of a light projector—like those used in movie theaters—traversing sheets of cut-out paper.

This image does not represent reality. It becomes what Jean Baudrillard calls a simulacrum, ¹⁰ an image that no longer bears any relation to any original reality. Instead of copying reality, it operates as its own closed system of meaning. “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself,” ¹¹ writes Baudrillard. What we see is not the sun or the landscape, but a symbol that produces an aesthetic experience detached from the physical world. There is no deception, because there is no referent. There is only an image consumed as truth because of its capacity to simulate.

Other artists generate visual fictions that evoke fabricated archival nostalgia: images that produce untold stories, false memories, impossible metaphors. In the “happening” and subsequent installation in 16mm video To Everyone That Waves (2005), the artist Amalia Pica invited a group of people aboard a Dutch ship in the port of Amsterdam to wave white handkerchiefs, as if bidding farewell to those left behind on land. The action was filmed in a setting referential to cinematic and documentary language, disorienting the viewer and provoking a sense of impossibility: that of telling an unlived story, of participating in a fictional memory.

For Mexican artist Adela Goldbard, landscape interventions are a way in which fiction can penetrate reality. She calls these scenes “photographic fictions.” In her series Ficciones (Fictions)—and, in particular, the image Globo (Balloon) (2006)—she uses subtle gestures to generate estrangement: everyday objects appear in ambiguous places, suspended in an indeterminate time. The result is an outdated image that skews the familiarity of the environment, allowing it to oscillate between the recognizable and the impossible.