Session: 2h
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 1.18
Chair: Ifor Duncan
Manon Raffard (University of Manchester), “Something in the Water: Smell Experience and Aquatic Ecohorror in Octave Mirbeau’s La 628-E8 (1907)”
Abstract: The presentation will explore the literary and ideological issues raised by threatening olfactory representations of water in Octave Mirbeau’s La 628-E8 (1907). This semi-autofictional text focuses on celebrating the automobile as the pinnacle of human ingenuity; industrial modernity; and hygienic living according to the latest scientific discoveries. However, while the second half of the nineteenth century saw the birth and subsequent diffusion of Pasteurian germ theory in France and in Europe, enduring beliefs in the potency and danger of malodorous miasmas were surprisingly pervasive. In the context of hygienic efforts to reduce the circulation of pathogens, stagnant water was a special source of epidemic anxieties and horrific cultural representations as early as the early-modern period and up until the mid-twentieth-century. In Mirbeau’s text, still water embodies various epidemiological and civilizational fears, especially in the context of globalization, industrialization and colonization. Focusing my enquiry on Mirbeau’s depictions of the Amsterdam canals in La 628-E8, I will demonstrate how enduring collective beliefs in the threat posed by malodours influenced his perception of water bodies as equally fascinating, fearful and horrifying. Mirbeau’s waters are indeed given agency over their environment, both through their active propagation of toxic miasma; and through their mythographical anthropomorphization as hostile supernatural beings, bent on revenge against humanity. In this regard, the problematic form of La 628-E8—concurrently travelogue, journal, essay, novel and autofiction—allows for a dialectical approach, in comparison with non-literary sources. I will therefore contextualize Mirbeau’s depiction of the smelly and threatening Amsterdam canals with nineteenth-century scientific and historical texts displaying comparable ecohorrific collective beliefs regarding the toxic influence of still water.
Bio: Manon Raffard holds PhD in French Studies from the Université de Bourgogne Europe. Her doctoral research (to be published) explored literary and cultural interactions between olfaction and knowledge in France (1857–1914). She currently teaches secondary school students and carries out independent research on smell; the environment; and class violence in nineteenth-century France. Her work has been extensively published in journals and edited collections (https://cv.hal.science/manon-raffard). She is currently a Hallsworth Fellow at the University of Manchester.
Kate Huber (Tilburg University), “Developing Differently: An Exploration of How Art Imagines Multispecies Modernization”
Abstract: To solve everything from the climate crisis to persistent pollutants, people often turn to new technologies. Especially in the Netherlands, where ‘nature’ is so often anthropogenically engineered, technologies regularly reflect, rather than challenge, nature-culture binaries. Seawalls attempt to impose a barrier between land and water amid rising sea levels. Yet these logics of enclosure can, as Stefan Helmreich has shown, exacerbate climate-induced flooding in riparian environments. While people may look to more modernization projects to ‘fix’ problems arising from earlier developments, including carbon emissions causing the climate crisis, new technologies from salmon ladders to wildlife crossings persistently recycle older models of development that consistently prioritize anthropocentric wants and needs. Wildlife crossings, for example, do not fully address how human roads cut off multispecies migration and reduce habitat through light and sound pollution, as science writer Ben Goldfarb explains. New forms of modernization are clearly needed to cultivate methods of adaptation in and with dynamic multispecies environments. Yet what do these methods look, feel, smell, sound, and taste like? This paper examines the experimental methods artists like Neal White and Tina O’Connell and collectives such as Loom develop and deploy. White and O’Connell brought “perpetual daylight” to humans in Amstelpark, for example, pointedly reproducing the experiences of birds and insects living with pervasive light pollution. Their study ends with a call to action to change lights mthroughout the Netherlands to a red spectrum that does not kill other species. The Rhine River Rehearsal project by Loom, a practice-based collective for cultural transformation, explores multisensory methods to trace and reflect upon changing human and more-than-human relationships with the River Rhine. By examining diverse projects like these, this paper considers what technologies, relationships, and senses humans in the Netherlands might need to collectively work toward multispecies futures in a changing world.
Bio: Kate Huber is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University. She specializes in multimedia cultural analysis, postcolonial ecocriticism, eco-media studies, and transnational environmental justice, with a focus on Dutch and anglophone literatures and cultures. Kate is author of Irish Ecomedia: Empire and Environmental Justice in the Modernization of Postcolonial Ireland, which explores the ongoing connections between colonialism and the environment across a range of twentieth and twenty-first century photography, literature, broadcast, and film media
David Alexandre Silva Revés (Nova University of Lisbon), “Post-Anthropocentric Testimonies of the Rhine River: Material Agency and Eco-Narrativity in the Face of Collapse and Extinction”
Abstract: This paper examines the testimonial operativity of South-African artist James Webb’s sound art by focusing on the Rhine River as a more-than-human witness to ecological collapse and multispecies extinction. At the centre is Webb’s installation A Series of Personal Questions Addressed to River Rhine (2023), where a disembodied voice poses intimate questions that activate the river not as backdrop but as interlocutor: a memory-bearing and narratively expressive entity. Drawing on material ecocriticism, object-oriented ontologies, testimony studies, and speculative storytelling, the analysis shows how Webb troubles anthropocentric paradigms. Marked by centuries of warfare, industrial exploitation, and, more recently, climate-induced drought, the Rhine expresses not as a symbol but as “storied matter” (Iovino & Opperman), “materially agentive” (Barad), and a witness across human and nonhuman timescales. Against spectacle-driven apocalyptic imaginaries, Webb mobilises what I call (after Grusin’s “premediation”) as retro-premediation: it retrieves unresolved material histories and suppressed contingencies to illuminate present crises and latent futures. In this framework, extinction is not a discrete rupture or redemptive closure, but an ongoing material condition inscribed in ecological and cultural flows alike, aligning with Derrida’s understanding of the apocalyptic as an unveiling process.
In Web’s work, listening emerges as an ethical mode of attunement and attention, creating a “sympathetic space” (Ballard) as a form of relationality between human and nonhuman ecologies, also resonating with Julia Emberly’s notion of “testimonial uncanny,” whereby historically marginalized voices reclaim presence. The Rhine’s historical entanglement with Utrecht, as the Kromme Rijn branch, shaping the city’s Roman foundations and canal infrastructures, further highlights how rivers inscribe both urban memory and eco-vulnerability. Webb’s eco-acoustic practice then offers a post-anthropocentric poetics and new politics of testimony, positioning the Rhine simultaneously as past witness and potent-future voice, reframing extinction and collapse as a continual process of exposure, responsibility, and resistance.
Bio: David Revés lives and works between Lisbon and Brussels. PhD candidate at NOVA University of Lisbon and visiting researcher fellow at Linköping University, 2026-28. He is co-artistic director of SALTO (Lisbon) and founder of METANOIA, a nomadic project focused on narratives of extinction, collapse, and decay. David has developed artist residencies and exhibitions internationally in institutions such as Färgfabriken Konsthall (SE), Cité des Arts (FR), SOL (Nexø, DK), Frappant (DE), DIDAC Foundation (ES), and Culturgest, CIAJG, Leal Rios Foundation, Municipal Galleries of Lisbon (PT), among others.