Paper short abstract:

This paper and the accompanying audiovisual piece propose a sensory and imaginative exploration of the extractive landscape surrounding the mining town of Schefferville and the Innu community of Matimekush - Lac John, Québec.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from my current PhD project and from ethnographic and audio-visual materials gathered during a first fieldwork research in 2022, this paper and the accompanying audiovisual piece propose an audiovisual exploration of the extractive landscape surrounding the mining town of Schefferville and the Innu community of Matimekush – Lac John, Northern Québec. Combining images, sound and text, they both invite to a sensory and imaginative engagement with the landscape itself and with the human and nonhuman beings and stories that inhabit it.

While one of the primary goals of the piece is to convey a sense of how extractive operations have impacted and continue to impact the territory around Schefferville and the life of the human and nonhuman beings inhabiting it, it also proposes an expanded reflection on the territory by engaging with its human, nonhuman, natural, infrastructural and metallic elements. Blending ethnography, observational audiovisual practices, eco-fictional scenes, and sensory descriptions, this piece is conceived as a first experimental approach towards a framework that allows for the connection of the multiple fragments emerging from oral and written histories, human, nonhuman and material relations, cultural productions and scientific data, as well as past memories, lived experiences of the present(s) and imagined futures. By threading these disparate and sometimes contradictory materials together, the accompanying paper also questions the contemporary aesthetics and representations of extractive landscapes.