- Convenors:
-
Mariagiulia Grassilli
(University of Sussex)
Raminder Kaur (University of Sussex)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Partner Event
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 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 Thursday 9 March, 2023, -Raminder Kaur (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
How do youth in India imagine their futures? With a focus on superhero comics including the snake-like Nagraj, the atomic powered Parmanu and the ethereal powers of Shakti, this paper showcases a film, Dishoom India, with a focus on the social and imaginative worlds of youth in north India.
Paper long abstract:
Superheroes bring to mind caped crusaders such as Superman, Batman, or Captain America. The more gender attuned foreground Wonderwoman among other avatars. Those looking eastwards might highlight Japanese characters from Manga. But what about other cultural repertoires of intergalactic superheroes/heroines? How do other young people engage with illustrations, storytelling and imaginaries of superheroism?
Too often cultural examples from the global South are seen through a western or Eurocentric lens. There is a need to appreciate other comic books and youth cultures on their own terms in conversation with other cultural trends on an equal footing as part of connected yet culturally distinctive communities.
India hosts the world's largest youth population (aged 15-25) yet little is known about their social and imaginative worlds. This film, Dishoom India!, enables an appreciation of Indian comic books and youth cultures on their own terms in conversation with other cultural trends on an equal footing as part of connected yet culturally distinctive communities.
So far one only hears about India's space exploration, moon mission, nuclear submarines and other attempts to become a regional superpower. Fantasies to become a global and even intergalactic superpower are strikingly evident in superhero/ine stories that adds other fascinating, and perhaps disturbing, layers of cultural meaning to the fantastic outputs of an emerging Asian power.
The film draws upon anthropological and comic studies research that informs the book, Adventure Comics and Youth Cultures in India by Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal (Routledge, 2018)
Aladin Borioli
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses farming and beekeeping practises taking place in Blade Runner 2049, to sketch a scenario about the future of beekeeping. How synthetic farming, a technofix developed in this film, feedbacks upon our current food production system?
Paper long abstract:
In Blade Runner 2049 (BR2049), the main characters, K, experiences a weird and eerie encounter when a honeybee peacefully lands on their hand steering them to a fully active apiary of about ten beehives. These bees shouldn’t survive there, not in the middle of a city blasted by nuclear explosions; and ultimately not in the Blade Runner universe which depicts a late capitalist future where high-tech utopia was reached at the cost of the planet earth. For the past two decades, monitoring devices, made possible by accessible low-cost components and the miniaturisation of technology, have infiltrated beehives, transforming them into small technologised sites of data production called Smart Hives – the central element of Precision Beekeeping (PB) which uses digital technology to monitor bees. This digitisation process slowly and sly reshapes beekeepers’ relationships with their bees and the practice of apiculture. Mark Fisher describes SF Capital (science-fiction capital) as the cohesion between speculative stories about the future and capital; capital hijacks information, transforms it into an economic value, and use it as a powerful vector to create feedback loop between a preferred future and its becoming present (Eshun 2003). This paper, therefore, mixes an ethnography about the forthcoming of digital devices in beekeeping with an in-depth analyse of BR2049’s vision of the future of food production. This unveils the biopolitic at play in current beekeeping practices and asks how the future of our relationship with bees will look like.
Raffaello Rossini
Paper short abstract:
"The Force Awakens", an episode of the Star Wars saga, was released in theaters in 2015, invading cinemas and therefore the imagination of millions of viewers. In the same years, the controversial process of de-communization was promulgated in the "distant galaxy" of Ukraine.
Paper long abstract:
Among the various consequences of these laws, there was the destruction and / or removal of the innumerable statues of Lenin scattered throughout the Ukrainian territory.
It is no coincidence that the first monument on planet Earth dedicated to the Sith Lord, the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Army Darth Vader appeared in Odessa, in 2015. It is a statue of Lenin "retouched" by the Odessa sculptor Alexander Milov.
A few days ago in front of the public at the VivaTech fair in Paris, the Ukrainian president appeared as a jedi in hologram format, with a Star Wars T-shirt with the words «come to the dark side», (of the Force).
At the end of September 2022 Mark Hamill (or perhaps Luke Skywalker?) was appointed ambassador of the UNITED24 fundraising platform, which supports the Army of Drones project for the benefit of Ukraine, directly by President Zelenskyy, it is clear that the entourage of the President of Ukraine is reworking this type of symbolic representation, specially from military and political perspective.
Does Skywalker's agency coincide with Hamill's agency? Or with Zelenskyy's? Is science fiction really a plastic tool for the construction of probable imaginaries? And what kinds of imaginaries? Will the dark side prevail?
In Ukraine, in a peculiar way compared to the rest of the world, have the iconographic references conveyed by Star Wars become symbols around which the population has begun to build its own identity as a "resistant" population?
Yasmin Fedda (Queen Mary University London)
Paper short abstract:
Stories without Borders is a film practice-based research output that captures the realities and envisions the futures of 'protracted displacement economies' in 5 countries across the world.
Paper long abstract:
Around the world many refugees and displaced people are in limbo: unable to return home, unwanted where they are living and unable to go anywhere else, often living in long term precarious environments. Across 5 different locations (DRC, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Myanmar/Thailand) young filmmakers have made short creative documentaries looking to their futures, which may be insecure, yet despite this their dreams are still very high. Stories without Borders is a practice-based research output that captures the realities and envisions the futures of 'protracted displacement economies' in 5 countries across the world. This presentation will present some of these works, while also provoking our understandings of displacement affected communities by including the ‘host’ population, amongst others, and approaching the ‘economy’ as including both financial and non-financial transactions. This project aims to show that if community organisations and displaced people are empowered, the vast economic potential of displacement-affected communities around the world may be realised. 'Stories without Borders' is a film practice research output of the Protracted Displacement Economies Research project.