If the land is the site of life and culture, of community and nation, then “unland” would be its radical negation. a poetic neologism it implicitly retracts the promises contained in its linguistic kin "utopia," the no-place of an imagined, alternative future. Thus far from embodying the imagination of another and better world, unland is the obverse of utopia, a land where even "normal" life with all its contradictions, pains, and promises, happiness and miseries has become unlivable.
Andreas Huyssen, "Doris Salcedo's Memory Sculpture" from Present Pasts, 2003