Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the process of telling the stories of extraction in an emerging extractive landscape in Tajikistan through ethnographic film and animated portraiture. To what extent such earth writings can contribute to make visible gendered histories of extractive violence?

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore the lived, gendered and generational experiences of men, women and children in an emerging post-Soviet extractive landscape in Tajikistan - Kante - where I undertook ethnographic research in 2014-2015. I introduce two films that I co-directed: 'Komor (coal)', a video-ethnographic documentary portrait of Kante co-directed with a video-editor - Hattie Brookes-Ward, and 'Nadirah: coal woman' an animated ethnographic portrait based on the story of one female miner co-directed with a feminist animation artist - Kate Jessop. These two films, together, make visible men women and children miners' invisibilised stories of exclusion and gendered extractive violence in a context of economic desolation and politico-ecological transformation. In particular, they highlight the process through which the neoliberalisation of resources and its materialisation through the opening of a Sino-Tajik open-pit mine in the village led to the emergence of new forms of exclusions and hardships: men's restricted access to resources and loss of sense of worth, women informal miners' stigmatisation and shaming, and child labor. By presenting these two films, I interrogate the extent to which visual, embodied and art-based methodologies can participate in the broader project of creating alternative resource epistemologies and earth writings capable of making visible gendered (inter)generational hidden (hi)stories of extractive landscapes.