- Convenors:
-
Mariagiulia Grassilli
(University of Sussex)
Raminder Kaur (University of Sussex)
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- Format:
- Partner Event
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The ecological threats from environmental disasters, climate change and war are challenged by contemporary artists imagining alternative futures. This may be through sensorial, experimental, visual arts, comics, animation, performance and the moving image.
Long Abstract:
How do people imagine and envision different planetary threats around the world through different media? And what is the role of a multimodal anthropology in exploring the spectra of utopia and dystopia in such planetary futures?
Afro-, Indo- and indigenous futurism among others present multiple worlds, whereby different cosmologies, ideologies and aesthetics are engaged to comment on the past, present and future in a blend of time-spaces. For instance, reclaiming film and photographic archives, artists John Akomfrah and the Otolith Group create new modes of visual representations across identities, histories and spaces, unfolding the cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats. Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch - a glacier ice installation in the streets, surrounded by ordinary residents - reminds us of global warming, but also the separateness between the natural and urban world. Meanwhile, in the anthropocene or capitalocene, mortality, loss, displacement and fragmentation are framed through poetic visuals by eco-visionaries, climate justice projects or superheroes rising against / from the nuclear and other apocalyptic scenarios. Superheroic imaginaries have offered alternatives to nuclearised lives - from Parmanu in India to Godzilla and King Kong in Japan - whilst projecting potential environmental destruction in a post-human society.
This panel invites contributions that explore how visual anthropology engages and analyses the creative practices that reflect on environmental or apocalyptic threats in the past and the present through varied cultural perspectives on imagined futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss the distinct uses of photography in our ethnographic fieldwork and how it captures the sensorial and transformative aspects of the more-than-human agencies that compose the speculative future histories of the artists with whom we collaborate in our research.
Paper long abstract:
Transdisciplinary studies about art, more-than-human agencies, and speculative futures have emerged in recent years (Tsing 2015, 2019; Latour 2017; Stengers 2009; Haraway 2016; Hache 2019). These studies deal with themes and issues dear to Anthropology, especially those involving multispecies ethnographies (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; van Dooren, Kirksey & Munster 2016). At the same time, as Logé (2019) argues, in the face of the current uncertain environmental scenario, art also seems to have adopted a "poetic essence" that is particularly linked to the idea of ecology. In light of these discussions, by following the current debates on the possibilities of visual anthropology and sensory approaches in ethnography (Pink 2014, 2015, 2021), this paper aims to reflect on the uses of photography in our fieldwork as a way to capture the sensorial and transformative aspects of more-than-human agencies in art. Our interest lies in the speculative future histories that compose the work of the artists with whom we collaborate and the role of more-than-human agencies in their work. By making approximations between the photographs of our distinct fieldworks, we propose to investigate how the particularities of our photographic materials - choice of angles, distortions, light, and shadows - compose with the propositions of the artistic works of our collaborators. We ask: How can photographing artworks that present themselves as biologically living compositions help build speculative narratives of more-than-human worlds? How to use photography to capture and transmit the subtleties of more-than-human worlds and the constant transformation of the more-than-human in contemporary art?
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I discuss the research for the upcoming experimental essay film Sleeping Glaciers Breathing Slowly, which explores how Alpine populations experienced and interpreted the appearance of ‘sky fires’ during the Little Ice Age.
Paper long abstract:
During the so-called Little Ice Age (approx. 1560 – 1700 CE), the average temperature in central Europe dropped about 2°C, which resulted in extremely cold winters, growing glaciers, spoiled harvests, and severe famines, and fueled newly emerging profit-oriented forms of commerce. In this paper, I discuss the research for the experimental essay film Sleeping Glaciers Breathing Slowly, which departs from a collection of illustrated newspapers from the 1560s and explores how Alpine populations experienced and interpreted the unusual meteorological events, in particular the appearance of the northern lights, so called ‘sky fires.’ Tracing the story of the Little Ice Age into the present, the film reconsiders the history of the Little Ice Age to question past and present forms of adaptation to environmental crisis. The paper thereby explores the role of sound and the practice of deep listening to encounter experiences of change in past and present Alpine landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
Indigenous peoples are framed as environmental stewards of global natural heritage in current neoliberal conjuncture of extractivism and multiculturalism. This presentation discusses the capacity of multimodal ethnographic engagements for creating 'spaces' of contestation in capitalist frontiers.
Paper long abstract:
The current globally circulating narratives and mediations of indigenous peoples as environmental stewards bring together two 'ideals' around which utopian (and dystopian) scenarios are organized in environmental governance (Igoe 2005). One provides a 'planetary vision' of 'Spaceship Earth' in long-durée, geological time, where the future of humanity as a global community depends on saving its terrestrial/ecological support system (Nugent 1994, Escobar 1996). The other one one projects a 'multicultural vision' of this Spaceship Earth, where Indigenous or tribal peoples with rights to culture - but not necessarily to territory or autonomy (Neizen 2003) are imagined as the stewards of nature 'rooted' in place and frozen in time, occupying the colonial and racial slot that needs to be protected against capitalism, development and the West (Li 2000). These visions of past, present and future of ecological and cultural survival 'contain' contradictory political enframings of differently situated actors and institutions, seeking to render 'nature' and 'indigeneity' visible in particular ways, in current conjuctural 'moment' (cf. Hall) of entanglement of nature and culture with capitalist commodity logics and extactivism. How can we 'contextualize' and 'capture' the multiplicity of 'frictions' (Tsing 2004) and imagine 'collaborative encounters' (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Gullamon 2019) without undermining local struggles and recreating colonial archives? This paper will focus on different web and video-based mediations of 'authentic', traditional' and 'indigenous' Bedik (menik-speaking) communities in South-Eastern Senegal, analyzing their finctionalized 'trutful' stories curated for international audiences, and strategies and forms of multimodal anthropology that can open spaces for creative invention.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates how modern ruins in Bulgaria attest to the active nature of material decay as one that makes new ways of social and ecological life possible, animated by a contemporary culture of gleaning that re-imagines urban media futures.
Paper long abstract:
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc over the following decade, the Transition Period (1989-Present) in Bulgaria from communism to market economy evidenced the gradual erosion of urban, political, social, and economic structures. The shift towards privatization that satellite states of the Soviet Union witnessed in the aftermath of the Cold War led to instability that has surfaced most visibly in the state of ruination that continues to characterize the urban landscape. To this day, twentieth-century ruins in Bulgaria are as much a means of remembering the past as they are a testament to how the remnants of empire continue to wield power. Drawing on oral history interviews and participant observation that I completed over the past two summers, this paper centers on how living with and through a state of ruin (economic, political) informs the ways in which physical ruins mediate new forms of life. By employing a visual media studies approach to anthropology and contemporary archaeology, the paper traces out a circulation of ruin matter in Bulgaria where an active culture of gleaning includes the gradual accrual of economic and physical sustenance, political authority, and historical memory. The paper finally explores how methodologies in sensory and patchwork ethnography best capture this state of gleaning to help re-imagine the future of the archive and the historical narratives we tell of the post-socialist space.