Session: 2a
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 0.17
Chair: Katarzyna Paszkiewicz
Panel description: This panel is concerned with exploring non- or more-than-human relationalities on screen, posing questions about how cinema can challenge the anthropocentric ways of seeing the world. Each paper will address these questions through a variety of perspectives – including ecocriticism, critical animal studies, decolonial thought and indigenous cosmologies – and with different answers, spanning issues of multispecies alliances, mutability, “zoopoetics” and care. We will analyse a range of contemporary texts, including recent animated films Flow (2024) and The Wild Robot (2024), Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023), as well as Andrea Arnold’s Bird (2024). This panel is part of the research project “Cinema and Environment 2: Ways of seeing beyond the Anthropocene”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and the European Union (Grant PID2023-152989NB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE). Principal Investigator: Katarzyna Paszkiewicz.
Stephanie Rincón Ramos (University of the Balearic Islands), “Imagining Otherwise: Multispecies Alliances in Flow and The Wild Robot”
Abstract: Fantasy scholar Brian Attebery argues that fantasy’s primary cultural significance rests in its “capacity for mythopoiesis: the making of narratives that reshape the world” (2014, 4). This world-building is further elevated by animation, as it “facilitates fantasy because its normative conditions enable ‘magic’” (Wells 2018, 27); therefore, fantasy animation can create worlds that defy the anthropocentric myopia of ecocidal narratives (Oziewicz 2022) and bring forth more-than-human voices and multispecies narratives. Moreover, both Ursula Heise (2014) and Paul Wells (2018) highlight animation’s propensity to bring into relief the agency of the material world, and its refusal to render it inert. This “aliveness”, as it were, is a narrative and aesthetic affordance of the genre that allows it to give visual and narrative agency to nonhuman animals and more-than-human beings, and through that, build eco-conscious storyworlds.
This paper addresses two contemporary animated films, Flow (2024) and The Wild Robot (2024), to argue that animation’s “plasmatic nature” (Heise 2014) opens up space for narratives that explore the lives and experiences of nonhuman agents beyond the sphere of human influence, namely animals and A.I. robots. Rooted in the fantastic, these films enable speculative reimaginings of ecological entanglements and multispecies alliances, making use of anthropomorphism (Wells 2009) and speculative ways of being otherwise. Drawing on indigenous cosmologies (Kimmerer 2013), eco-fantasy studies (Oziewicz 2022, Attebery 2022) and animation theory (Wells 2009, Heise 2014), this paper examines how these films dramatize more-than-human relationalities not by mimicking reality, but by constructing storyworlds and narratives where kinship and care are central to achieving harmony and overcoming the adversities of a changing planet.
Bio: Stephanie Rincón is a third year PhD student at the University of the Balearic Islands, a recipient of the FPUCAIB 2023 grant and a member of the research project “Cinema and Environment 2: Ways of Seeing beyond the Anthropocene”. Her current research is situated at the intersection of studies of fantasy media, postcolonial theory and animation, examining how recent children’s animated series represent the more-than-human world, oftentimes challenging the binaries that typically underlie anthropocentric narratives.
Laura Del Vecchio (University of the Balearic Islands), ““All That You Change Changes You”: Mutability and Presence in Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)”
Abstract: The title of this paper comes from an epigraph in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). In the novel, the protagonist, Lauren, lives in a dystopian—although disturbingly current—world undone by religious fanatism, racial violence, and ecological catastrophe. Through writing, Lauren transforms despair into resilience, shaping Earthseed, a philosophy crystallized in its central verse: “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change” (Butler 1993, 14).
Raven Jackson’s film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) also explores notions of change, though in a different register from Butler’s novel. Through the non-linear unfolding of time, the film shows the main character’s encounters with others, where forms continually shift while retaining traces of what they once were. Whereas Butler dramatizes survival through the struggles of oppressed people who, fleeing violence, forge alliances with other refugees and envision a future sustained by the principle of becoming a seed that multiplies “From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving—forever Changing” (Butler 1993, 342), Jackson turns to living and dying, lingering on the porousness of existence, showing how human life loses its fixed form and joins with the other, whether human or otherwise.
Drawing on Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of “becoming-with” and Jane Bennet’s (2010) notion of “vibrant matter”, as well as decolonial thinking attentive to material existences that resist narrations of historical erasure and the myth of “empty territories” (Nixon 2018, Tavares 2024), this paper meditates on multispecies “mutability” and “presence” through the comparative reading of Jackson’s film and Butler’s novel. Here, I argue that presence and mutability “compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time” (Haraway 2016, 97), delineating that, through the mutation of matter itself, presence is not bound to the human alone; it is distributed, multispecies, and enduring.
Bio: Laura Del Vecchio is a PhD candidate at the University of the Balearic Islands and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Her research focuses on the analysis of sonic elements in cinema to understand the listener’s positionality and the agency of sound. She integrates contributions from sound studies with ecocinema, decolonial and posthumanist thought to challenge anthropocentric perspectives and explore cosmologies of thinking among different species.
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (University of the Balearic Islands), “Animal Cinematic Poet(h)ics: Multispecies Resilience in the Edgelands”
Abstract: The cinema of Andrea Arnold has been described as particularly responsive to the nonhuman (Lawrence 2016; Thornham 2016; Paszkewicz 2023). Building on ecocinematic approaches to screening nonhuman animals (Pick and Narraway 2013, Cahill 2019) and Kári Driscoll’s and Eva Hoffmann’s conceptualization of “zoopoetics” (2018), this paper will address the relationship between animality and Arnold’s cinematic poet(h)ics, with a particular focus on Fish Tank (2009) and her latest film, Bird (2024). Both films offer a richly poetic engagement with the multispecies relationality through their depiction of “edgelands”, a term coined by Marion Shoard (2002) to refer to the liminal, often neglected, territories where the urban and the rural intersect. Considering multispecies poet(h)ics through the cinematic rendering of the edgelands, inhabited or traversed by human and nonhuman animals, this paper will reflect on the ethico-political challenges of representing more-than-human relationalities on screen. I contend that the attention to these liminal spaces of precarity and resilience helps blur the conventional divides between nature and culture, questioning the hierarchical distinction and anthropocentric violence that tend to organize the human/animal encounters on film. Yet, it also highlights how different beings are exposed to death in unequal ways. Ultimately, Arnold’s figurative and, at the same time, phenomenological treatment of animality opens up questions about the historical legacy of screening the nonhuman, showing how aesthetic forms, including cinema, are closely intertwined with ethical and political injustices.
Bio: Associate Professor in English and Film Studies. Her articles on ecocinema, affect theory and eco-esthetics, as well as the aesthetics of petroleum appear in journals such as Studies in European Cinema, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, among others. She has co-edited, with Andrea Ruthven, Cinema of/for the Anthropocene (2025) for Routledge Advances in Film Studies and is completing her book on de-anthropocentric visualities (under contract with Routledge). Her video essays appeared in Feminist Encounters and Teknokultura.