Contribution short abstract:

Different cosmologies, ideologies and aesthetics are framed through poetic visuals by eco-visionaries, contemporary artists and indigenous futuristic media.

Contribution long abstract:

A sensory, sonic, visual experience will reflect on the violence, love and urgency that nature embraces in the here now - where glaciers are melting fast, seas are rising, global warming and fire engulf our earth. And yet there is still not enough awareness, understanding, embracing of the near threat of extinction of our ecosystem.

Whilst challenging the yet too ineffective governmental action, this visual poem recognizes the ways in which artistic experimental visual practice engages with political ecology, provoking and challenging the indifference that still surrounds environmental threats. The visual politics of climate refugees, cinematic entanglements of environment and ecology, collective performances, indigenous futurist media, among others, are connected through visual threads, as a homage and tribute to the relentless struggle of earth defenders and our ability to envision positive planetary futures nevertheless.

Here, a visual journey across the multiple creative ways in which artists, activists, indigenous people, filmmakers and communities across the world represent the current challenges of climate change, environmental disasters and alternative planetary futures.

Contribution short abstract:

Gaia Giuliani's last book Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique (Routledge 2021) explores European and broader Western imaginaries of natural disaster, mass migration and terrorism through a postcolonial inquiry into modern conceptions of monstrosity and catastrophe.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper introduces Gaia Giuliani's last book Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique, which explores European and broader Western imaginaries of natural disaster, mass migration and terrorism through a postcolonial inquiry into modern conceptions of monstrosity and catastrophe. This book examines established icons of popular visual culture in sci-fi, doomsday and horror films and TV series, as well as in images reproduced by the news media to trace the genealogy of modern fears as well as of ontologies and logics of the Anthropocene. By logics of the Anthropocene, the book refers to a set of principles based on ontologies of exploitation, extermination and natural resource exhaustion processes that determine who is worthy of benefiting from value extraction and being saved from catastrophes and who is expendable. Fears for the loss of isolation from the unworthy and the expendable are investigated here as originating anxieties against migrants’ invasions, terrorist attacks and planetary catastrophes, in a thread that weaves together re-emerging ‘past nightmares’ and future visions.

Contribution short abstract:

The paper conducts a dialectical critique of abstract, poetic, archival Black essay films, such as John Akomfrah's The Vertigo Sea, with their (post)colonial temporality of 'melancholic tragedy'. Do they present a concrete negation of racial capitalism, historical futurity and utopian social life?

Contribution long abstract:

The mid-20th century optimism of Bandung and Afro-Asian independence from (neo)colonialism has been replaced by what David Scott has called ‘postcolonial tragedy’. For Scott ‘…tragic sensibility...appears pre-eminently in moments of collision of in-commensurable historical forces…Thus, far from being a period of seamless succession or transition, decolonization might well be thought of as a disorienting, inconclusive moment of rupture especially conducive to tragic consciousness.’

This paper focuses on examining the ‘out of joint’ of the contemporary by considering a significant strand of global art and screen media, which is engaging with archives, memory and history to re-imagine the temporality of western modernity and racial capitalism. In particular by positing the relationship between (post)colonialism and modernity as an ‘ecological tragedy’, can 'disjunctive', alternative, longer histories of environmental destruction and global racism be envisaged?

By especially analysing the essay film, a dominant, experimental, poetic documentary form, projects such as those of John Akomfrah’s, The Vertigo Sea(2015), and Purple(2017), Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Serpent Rain(2017), and The Otolith Group’s The Radiant (2012) deconstruct the relationship between colonialism and histories of the environment. In these cultural works are pessimism, death, and disaster of tragic pasts constituting conditions for spatio-temporal ‘ruptures’ for a planetary futurity of hope?

The paper provides a dialectical critique of these films to examine if they are in their abstract, deconstructive forms, able to provide concrete negation of racial capitalism? Are the temporality of archival memories and melancholic tragedy able to present historical futurity and utopian social life?

Contribution short abstract:

This paper tells the story of La Janda wetland in Cádiz, Spain to think how humanism and ecology come together, as part of a constellation of alternative resources collected under the sign of planetarity.

Contribution long abstract:

La Janda is a 7,000 hectare wetland held in the basin that connects the settlements of Facinas, Vejer and Benalup. North of the Gibraltar straight, where Tarifa reaches towards Ceuta, it is filled by the Celemín, Almodóvar and Barbate rivers. Its extensive fresh and shallow waters made it a site of unique residence, rest and passage for millions of birds migrating between African and Europe, since at least the neolithic era.

In the 1950s and 60s that landscape changed dramatically. The lake was drained by Franco's government and became wet farmland devoted to rice growing. Its waters were funnelled to the sea through canals and metal pipes. This machinic feat, later over-strung with power lines and fringed with wind turbines, caused the demise of the bustards, cranes, orioles, bee-eaters and rollers that had stopped on their journey, and now passed over high or were impaled on high voltage cables.

In the autumn of 2021, I visited La Janda and although many birds were gone, cranes, black wings kites, black winged stilts, green sandpipers, among others still populated the area. The ground is still wet and, for now, the rivers still flow. This paper tells the story of La Janda to make a theoretical intervention on planetary humanism. Developing the concepts of depth, sediment, and the oceanic from critical theory and postcolonial studies, it engages La Janda to think how humanism and ecology come together, as part of a constellation of alternative resources collected under the sign of planetarity.