Violence Conference
Environment
Convened and organised by Rose Brander, Jyoti Mistry and Åsa Sonjasdotter
Concerning the burning, draining, depleting, and toxifying, as much as the lived realities of ending worlds: In the non-spectacle of slow violence, is peace with the Earth imaginable? In the ruins of neoliberal caretaking, is non-violence realistic?
This strand proposes to unpack the legacy of imperialist and patriarchal violences perpetrated against and upon the planet, and the potential role of transdisciplinary research and practices that are confronting, critiquing and refiguring this matter and narrative.
Humans – not all humans – possess the profound ability to alter their environment/habitat- to the extent that parts of the planet have become and are rapidly becoming uninhabitable. The brutal inequity of this emergency, where and who is impacted is devastating and unjust. Many scientific reports evidence the level of danger. The 2021 Frontiers in Conservation Science article predicts a sadly unsurprising, “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals.”
How are artists, scholars and activists addressing this profound /more-than/ humanitarian and existential crises? We invite abstracts from those interested in contributing to discussions on ecocide and environmental justice; methods for reworking the relation between land rights activism, political realism and global capitalism; racial and gender injustices, Indigeneity and peasantry, extinction and mutual dependency.
Plenary Description
Axelle Karera
The Black Anthropocene
It is indeed the case that Anthropos’ imprints on what we might provisionally call “nature” is undeniable. And the degree to which “man’s power” over the earth beckoned massive regimes of techno-ideologies of survival is equally irrefutable. Though discourses of the Anthropocene neither contest geology’s pronouncements nor invest in assessing the politics of its scientific nomenclature, the grounds on which the term continues to carve its discursive trajectories remains tenuous. Here, the accusations range from charges of obscurantism to calling the term a misnomer of catastrophic magnitude – a misnomer that merely revived the hegemonies of brute empiricisms at the expense of a vast range of critical work. These accusations are certainly not far-fetched; and critique’s “alleged” paranoia cannot overstate the punctual resurgence of a scientific rationality pruned for Anthropocenean anxieties. By assessing how and why Anthropocene discourses continue to uncritically endorse a seemingly salvific scientific logic, this talk turns to the figure of blackness in the Anthropocene in order to discern how renewed positivist sensibilities are effectively exculpating a range of violent actors while simultaneously incriminating the most vulnerable communities in our current ecological demise. More than only suggesting that blackness redirects our inquiries into the intimate complicities between destructive ecological violence and the imaginative arts of Anthropocene’s various caregivers, the talks shows that blackness’ ordinary experience of dispossession necessarily complicates matters at hand.
Schedule
Day 1 - Wednesday17 Nov 2021
10.00-11.30
Peace With the Earth
Åsa SonjasdotterÅsa ElzénAnnaLena BergquistSanna Hellgren
Location: online
Moderator: André Alves
Launch of Peace with the Earth (Fred med Jorden, 1940)
By Elisabeth Tamm and Elin Wägner
With an artist talk by Åsa Elzén
Hosted by university librarians AnnaLena Bergquist and Sanna Hellgren and editor of the pamphlet, Åsa Sonjasdotter
At Kvinnsam, the National Resource Library for Gender Studies, The University Library of Gothenburg
Peace with the Earth was written in the outbreak of the WW2 by the Swedish suffragettes and peace activists Elin Wägner [1882 – ] who was an author, and Elisabeth Tamm [1880- ] who was a politician and a practitioner of organic farming. This English translation is the first edition in another language. It is published by Archive Books, a community of practitioners invested in un-weaving repressive narratives and reclaiming the archive itself as a tool for un-fixing, de-archiving and re-archiving through non-hegemonic models.
The wish to translate and make this pamphlet available to a wider audience today have several reasons. The place it speaks from is not often referred to, nor in history writing and political theory, neither in the fields of agronomy or environmental studies. It gathers experiences made in the interrelated movements for women’s suffrage, peace, and organic farming taking place as resistance-from-within the aggressing powers during the first half of the 2000 century. The participants of this network were radical, intellectual, non-conform women, of whom many today most probably would call themselves queer. They operated between and across established, accepted and legally sanctioned societal structures such as patriarchal family orders, scientific disciplines, political parties, and religious communities, which means that their actions are poorly documented.
The activists of this movement had made their analysis clear. They recognized that war and war-like relations cannot be undone until patriarchal and colonial relations are overcome. They also recognized that, as Wägner states in the introductory chapter: ‘This involves a paradigm shift and all that it entails in terms of social change’.
The still ongoing and to incomprehensible scales escalating exploitation of Earthly life by corporate, state sanctioned powers, re-actualise the call of this pamphlet. To translate and re-read it across languages, countries and practices today is a way to reconnect to the wider discussions that the learnings captured in this pamphlet have emerged from, for the current debate to gain continuity, debt and scope. What have stirred the wish to re-visit the debates of this movement is the analysis of how, in order to overcome violent, extractive relations, peace not only between all people on the Earth is necessary, but as much with the Earth itself.
17.00-18.00
The Black Anthropocene
Axelle Karera
Location: online
Moderator: Jyoti Mistry
It is indeed the case that Anthropos’ imprints on what we might provisionally call “nature” is undeniable. And the degree to which “man’s power” over the earth beckoned massive regimes of techno-ideologies of survival is equally irrefutable. Though discourses of the Anthropocene neither contest geology’s pronouncements nor invest in assessing the politics of its scientific nomenclature, the grounds on which the term continues to carve its discursive trajectories remains tenuous. Here, the accusations range from charges of obscurantism to calling the term a misnomer of catastrophic magnitude – a misnomer that merely revived the hegemonies of brute empiricisms at the expense of a vast range of critical work. These accusations are certainly not far-fetched; and critique’s “alleged” paranoia cannot overstate the punctual resurgence of a scientific rationality pruned for Anthropocenean anxieties. By assessing how and why Anthropocene discourses continue to uncritically endorse a seemingly salvific scientific logic, this talk turns to the figure of blackness in the Anthropocene in order to discern how renewed positivist sensibilities are effectively exculpating a range of violent actors while simultaneously incriminating the most vulnerable communities in our current ecological demise. More than only suggesting that blackness redirects our inquiries into the intimate complicities between destructive ecological violence and the imaginative arts of Anthropocene’s various caregivers, the talks shows that blackness’ ordinary experience of dispossession necessarily complicates matters at hand.
Day 2 - Thursday18 Nov 2021
10.00-11.00
Representation: ethics and the lens
Silke PanseRuby Gilding
Location: online
Moderator: Louise Wolthers
Silke Panse Is the Sparrow an Actant in Being Shot? On the Violence of Latour’s Citizen-Gun Hybrids featuring The Day of the Sparrow and Spinoza
This paper sets a documentary about a sparrow who had been shot in a contract killing by a television company — as it interfered with an event to be recorded — in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s notion of political ecology populated by human-thing hybrids and Benedict de Spinoza’s affectual Ethics. In a complex choreography in which flying animals and humans with and in flying weapons collide and exclude one another, the documentary connects the death of the sparrow in apparent peace in the Netherlands with the death of a German soldier in war in Afghanistan. The film oscillates between seemingly peaceful nonhuman nature and shooting humans with and in their flying weapons.
Latour argued against the notion that humans would be in control of things and emphasized the action of everything in “a collective of humans and nonhumans.” The shooter and the weapon would be involved in the action of shooting to the same degree and in a symmetrical relation as “gun-citizens” and “citizen-guns.” This paper observes that who is shot does not appear since to be shot is not an action. Latour is only interested in this composition in terms of action, and to be shot is not an action. The part of the assemblage that is acted upon does not appear in this network of actors. Actants act. This paper questions Latour’s political ecology through Spinoza. Already Spinoza had suggested that a body is constituted by a collective of other bodies, but he also maintained that no body can be destroyed from inside: the shooter and the sparrow cannot be one body if one extinguishes the other. There is no shooter-shot hybrid. The paper expands Spinoza’s notion of a body to that of the body of a work which is constituted by being affected and affecting.
Ruby Gilding Slow Violence, Bergsonian Time, and the Climate Crisis: Contemporary Photographs of the Rhône Glacier
Climate change is facing a crisis of representation. Visual culture has a temporal bias towards spectacular violence, that which is coded as instantaneous and explosive, leaving no means with which to document slow-moving disasters in the image-driven world. With its focus directed at disasters of epic proportions, climate change photography would seem to offer compelling imagery that delivers on the conventions that the media requires. However, the story of climate change is one of “slow violence,” which is neither spectacular nor immediate, but incremental and attritional. The repercussions of climate change’s violence are relatively invisible, postponed for decades they lie beyond our contemporary life spans and cannot be captured by the camera’s lens. In order to redress conventional representations of climate change, photography needs to hold an understanding of temporality that can represent the ‘slow’, not just the ‘spectacular.’ This presentation turns to Bergsonian time to read photographs that picture climate change. Henri Bergson’s distinction between two modes of time, mathematical time and pure time, is used to analyse contemporary photographs of the Rhône Glacier in Switzerland. The presentation takes the trope of the melting glacier in climate change photography as its visual cue, and moves through three different photographic projects: Corinne Vionnet’s Souvenir d’un glacier (2015-2019), Simon Norfolk’s Shroud (2018) and Noémie Goudal’s Cyclope, Glacier du Rhône (2016). In doing so it addresses the issue of temporality, or rather temporalities, with which both photography and climate change can be better understood.
12.45-14.15
Extractavism: Replication / Disruption
Aleyda Rocha SepulvedaEmil BecerrilPedro AparicioCatalina Mejia MorenoJosefina Klinger
Location: online
Moderator: Cathryn Klasto
Aleyda Rocha Sepulveda Extractivism as a Design Method for Violence: Automating certainty through extraction
What does it mean to be human in a world where everything could be “alive” and “algorithmic” at the same time? A particular understanding of power lies at the root of algorithms and automatization. Certainty can, apparently, be engineered. Our cities, our houses, our bodies are integrating automation so that we may allegedly become more autonomous, even more, certain of our decisions. It is as if algorithms seek to fill the gaps on matters of care, to bring a sense of security in conflict resolution, discovery, compatibility, and invention. Our society is based on the exploitation and commodification of resources for the surplus and benefit of only a few people and regions. Although our geographies have expanded and maps have become more complex, the ongoing labor that mirrors neocolonial extraction continues prioritizing capital at the cost of environmental and human marginalization. Thus, this project assumes a designerly way of thinking system transitions within its artistic explorations, in which it takes into account the material state within which data collection unfolds, and how this materiality is displayed and revealed when in use. In other words, extractive practices can reproduce, reconfigure, manipulate, use and misuse as maintained by the conditions of the environment. Therefore, to assume a designerly way of thinking is to uncover histories and new narratives of the meanings of automation. At the heart of this research is the aim to identify and reveal ‘extractive practices’ in data collection attached to current systems of automation. All these practices come alive through validation, whereas, political consensus, and/or legacies of injustice continue to be replicated. Taking a particular interest in how these practices have been manifested, amplified, and mirrored in settings of categorization, data collection, and notions of fixity throughout history. I look at all the assumptions that are embedded in these practices and the limits of it, especially in the rising field of technologies of automation (such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms) and their inherent bonds with the environment.
Emil Becerril Politics of Despoilment: Environmental and Colonial Violence in the Global South
The production and administration of nature are closely associated with the machination of capitalism. The project of modernity has granted us a vision of nature as an external force, fabricated from the accumulation of capital and the appropriation of flows of life (Moore, 2020). Yet it has exploited the experience of a material world and established an environmental coloniality, forging a system that enhances the exploitation and looting of bodies, memories and territories. The imposition of histories intertwined with biocultural materialities and conceived from the global north, outline a colonial framework, accentuating an “ecological imperialism” (Crosby, 1999). They reaffirm practices and aesthetics of exportation, domestication, racialization, sexualization, pathologization and idealization of nature. Against this form of organizing or narrating nature, it is urgent to expose the socioecological contradictions involved in the co-production of life, capital and power. How can we (re)imagine a chronopolitics, a politics that disputes the order and meaning of temporalities that affect the social, economic, ecological and cultural spheres? Focusing on a series of cases and artistic practices located in Mexico, related to extractivist practices, politics of looting and neocolonial violence, this paper will try to ask how to re-articulate a political ecology that disrupts the present through the proclamation of invisible or silenced counter-narratives that make memory a form of production of environmental histories situated from the global south?
Pedro Aparicio, Catalina Mejia Moreno & Josefina Klinger Con la selva en la cabeza y con el agua en el corazón (With the rainforest in one’s head, and water in one’s heart)
This abstract responds to Parse’s call On Violence, as a proposition to look at violence through the eyes of a project of non-violence. In the north of Colombia’s pacific coast, the Colombian Government is planning to construct a major port, together with train lines and oil pipelines that aim to expand the underused maritime infrastructure of the country, and to strengthen commercial links with Asia. It is a violent project that puts at risk and threatens the delicate balance of the environmental ecosystem and social ecologies of one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. This presentation will give voice to Josefina Klinger, an Afro-Colombian environmental activist living in Nuquí, Chocó in the north pacific coast of Colombia, and to her Festival de la migración pacífica (Festival of the Pacific Migration). With dances, costumes, music, and children leading a festive parade and other events, biodiversity, environmental awareness, social cohesion and empowerment of indigenous and black youth living in this area is being celebrated whilst at the same time taught. As a yearly celebration that is linked to the migration of species that occurs every year between June and October in this region, and with an activist environmental agenda in mind, this Festival further aims to break with paradigms of exclusion, violence, poverty, and victimization that this territory has historically been subjected to. As a counter project, the Festival is a sensitive, subtle, and persistent form of activism that stands aside from ‘loud’ protests and forms of governance – which still today are usually silenced through violence. One of Josefina’s dreams is to postulate the Festival to Colombia’s Ministry of Culture or to the UN, aiming to register it as a cultural heritage. This presentation will take the opportunity to voice and manifest our process working on this potential nomination as an act of solidarity, care and non violent practice that counters the various violent practices still tied to environmental and social activism.
17.15-19.00
Archives and Witnessing
Marc Johnson & Hitomi Ohki 大木瞳Linda Maria Thompson
Location: online
Moderator: Åsa Sonjasdotter
Marc Johnson & Hitomi Ohki 大木瞳 In the archival multiverse, the blubber decays but the fever increases
“Scholarship in society is inescapably political.”[1]
Howard Zinn
The presented work is composed by Marc Johnson — a memory worker — who is currently a PhD candidate in performative and media-based practices at the Stockholm University of the Arts. The shared perspectives are engaging issues of violence from the center of an artistic practice-based research focused on archival practices and concerned with how a documentary heritage circulates, is formed, debated, shared, and re-interpreted.
The lecture performance starts by considering the “Rights of Nature” — from recent environmental litigations in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Bolivia and Ecuador — which focus on the idea of legal standing. What does it take to enforce the legal personhood of a river or other natural entities?
Marc Johnson investigates and reflects on some ways to deal with representations of murdered bodies — human and more-than-human (cellular life forms) — without replicating historical patterns of abuse? Under what conditions shall these documents, artifacts or, images be seen?
Marc Johnson collaborates with Hitomi Ohki 大木瞳 — Soprano singer — to expose how polyphony[2] and counterpoint[3]applied to cinema can be used practically to navigate the uncertain archive(s) of violence studies.
Marc Johnson addresses the dynamics of archival silences[4] and archival amnesty[5] as an important reminder of the ways in which violence — despite its presence in the everyday life of most people mainly through paper-based, and online news media (including social networks) — can also be deeply buried and invisible through institutional and corporate powers and other means; nonetheless impacting the lives of ordinary people (as opposed to powerful people, military, political and business leaders).
The proposal does not intend to resolve; but rather to expose and to put oneself in the presence of using the means of montage.
Skepsis is the deployed strategy throughout the duration of the time-based work as defined by Jacques Derrida as a “vigilance, and attention of the gaze during an examination. […] One is on the lookout, one reflects upon what one sees, reflects what one sees by delaying the moment of conclusion.”[6]
[1] Howard Zinn, “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest,” The Midwestern Archivist 2, no. 2 (1977): 14–26.
[2] A process of combining two or more voices so that they harmonize with each other but maintain their individuality.
[3] A process of adding one or more melodies as an accompaniment to a given melody according to certain fixed rules; a composition in which melodies are thus combined.
[4] Rodney G. S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria, September 25, 2006, 215–33.
[5] Tonia Sutherland, “Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice,” ed. Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, Critical Archival Studies, 1, no. 2 (2017): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.42.
[6] Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Linda Maria Thompson Seeing industrial violence over time: Rephotography and the environmental damages of log driving on the Ljusnan River in Sweden.
The images are violent. In the photographs, the natural flow of the Ljusnan river is replaced by some three million logs harvested from forests upstream. This was the 24th of May, 1917 when the “Storbröten” log jam was formed. It was one of the world’s largest log jams consisting of 787,500 cubic meters of logs, spanning 1245 meters long and ca 28 meters deep. The images of Storbröten show overt violence, but a more subtle use of photography in the exploitation of the Ljusnan river is also present in the archives. The industrial exploitation of Sweden’s waterways as timber-floating routes and for hydroelectrical development, helped Sweden make its debut as an industrialized and modernized nation. This resulted however in catastrophic consequences for the fluvial ecosystems and biodiversity affected. Remnants of the industrial image complex of log driving and dam-building in Sweden can be found in the form of photographic documents at local and national archives. One collection is the Ljusnan Flottningsföreningsarkiv, translated; Log Driving Association archive at the Swedish National Archive in Härnösand, Sweden. While images from these and other archives depicting industrial violence against waterways are often used as illustration for historical accounts, there is a lack of analysis from visual and ecological perspectives. This work explores how photography was used as a way of both participating in – and documenting both the overt and more subtle industrial violence against waterways in Northern Sweden. Through study of a handful of photographs from the Ljusnan watershed, patterns of (repeat or) rephotographic practices are evident, offering an opportunity to discuss how rephotography has been used both to colonize nature, as well as how photographic methods and techniques may be used in its decolonization. This presentation will reflect upon these images as well as related experiments from my artistic practice.
Day 3 - Friday19 Nov 2021
12.30-14.00
Multispecies Narratives
Ingibjörg Gísladóttir/ Vera Jensen/ Frauke Materlik & Andrea StokesJack Faber
Location: online
Moderator: Rose Brander
Frauke Materlik, Andrea Stokes, Inga Gisladottir, Vera Jensen Mountain
Geologists have a saying: Rocks remember. ‘Mountain’ is formed by fragmented layers of observing, thinking, shaping and interacting. The work gives a ‘voice’ to environments in Western Greenland, and conveys forceful encounters with ‘progress’. ‘Mountain’ explores discursive, poetic and descriptive forms of narration in Greenlandic and English. At PARSE, we want to share a collective audio visual story, video and performance on interactions of infrastructure with sociological, environmental and visual aspects. Land has been altered beyond recognition. We witness and convey encounters of different speeds: age-old geological shapes meet the contemporary rapidness. A runway got established in Upernavik to connect the North to the other parts of the world. Thus, the top of the mountain ‘Livets Top’ (Top of Life) got removed. An act of ‘modernisation’ appears as a brual force, yet at the same time enables new encounters. This is the place where the collaborators behind ‘Mountain’ have met: We are an international and intergenerational group of four women complementing professional knowledge, skills and lived experience to speak from multi-disciplinary perspectives: Upernavik resident, video artist, story-teller, air traffic controller, administrator, performance artist, landscape researcher, tourist operator, academic. We draw on research in New Materialism and Post-Humanism that acknowledge the complexities of thinking and creating in our contemporary moment. We borrow the term ‘diffraction’ (Karen Barad) to indicate a methodology where one insight is read through another – a mapping or tracing where productive differences can manifest. Our wish is to implement models of collective thinking and making, and enable global perspectives and conversations on Nordic issues to flourish. We aim at activating the viewers’ imagination and ask: How can one take a critical position yet at the same time benefit from a violent act? The project is accepted by Goldsmiths Department of Sociology as part of ‘After Progress’, and funded by Nordisk kulturfond Opstart.
Jack Faber Eco Noir
The cultural concept of Noir originated from the unprecedented destruction raised by the fascist regimes of the first half of the 20th century. This ashen and burnt ground proven fertile for the original, disillusioned view Noir conveys on the violence humanity brought upon itself, resulting in colossal collateral and environmental damage. Noir, as an almost feral literary and cinematic approach – suggested a realistic reflection upon the inherent abuse of power, and the fatal consequences of its shadowy allure. It brought a perspective on life on Earth as an enduring struggle for sustaining an endangered existence. Almost a century later, we are still walking this same path paved by the legacy of totalitarian regimes, manifested in the all-encompassing contemporary corporate logic and its dominant short-term profit ideology. Between the constant distractions propagated by the ethically dubious algorithm-based Attention Economy, the exponentially growing fears festered by the Security Economy and the coronavirus crisis – all acting as catalysts for mass climate crimes – we are very much at a loss. ‘Eco Noir’ suggests new readings into the fragile and complex ways in which we inhabit and share our environment with other species, through the noirish perspective. This lecture-performance offers engaging meeting points formed by the tension and correlation between selected texts and visual artworks. It acts as a cartography for the cultural and artistic strategies we can suggest for emancipating our perception from viewing other species merely as subjects for politics of consumption or as objects of fascination. ‘Eco Noir’ aim to show how relations with other species correspond with ancient tales and rumours while offering new ways in which humans and animals can unite to create a contemporary common stories. Eco Noir is a based on ‘Eco Noir: A Companion for Precarious Times’, recently published by the University of the Arts, Helsinki.