The Monumentality of Linear Landscape

Abstract

The concept of the historic Silk Road summons images of dusty caravans and ruddy traders en route to the East and West. It suggests the bridging of civilizations and an early form of transregional economic networking. Today the Silk Road metaphor is being redeployed in reference to emergent energy corridors and burgeoning transportation infrastructures between China and Central Asia. The 1,833 km Turkmenistan­-China Gas Pipeline, completed in 2014, constitutes just one component of China’s $16.3 billion “New Silk Road Strategy.” Though subterranean for most of its journey, the pipeline reveals itself every several hundred kilometers as it runs parallel to the A2 highway in southern Kazakhstan. The A2 traces a fixed line from the Chinese border town of Khorgos, across Kazakhstan until it meets Uzbekistan near the city of Tashkent. This paper presents a visual index of the A2 highway, revealing glimpses of this region’s past, present, and future. Each image is a gesture, a momentary encounter, a fleeting insight into a landscape scattered with cultural artifacts. The images serve to make visible how the pipeline and the highway, the Soviet legacy and independent Kazakhstan, work together to produce cultural spaces along a linear landscape.