Session: 3a
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 0.17
Chair: Susanne C. Knittel
Abstract: This panel takes the notion of “ecologies of violence (ecoviolence)” as a generative framework for understanding interconnected harms across historical, geographical, and species lines, exploring how notions such as victimhood, responsibility, justice, and solidarity shift when the human–nature divide is unsettled.
Taking an ecological approach to violence and its representation and memory, the panel examines what aesthetic and political strategies emerge through cultural practices that can counteract both the violence itself and the discursive repression or “forgetting” of the connections between these histories of violence, a repression which itself forms part of an ecology of violence.
Focusing on documentary forms in poetry, theater, film, art, and curatorial practices, the papers examine how violence against ecosystems and nonhuman life is remembered, represented, and resisted, while also attending to the ways humans are implicated in these ecologies of harm. The notion of Ecoviolence foregrounds vulnerability as a shared condition, challenging narratives of nature’s “revenge” that risk reinscribing binaries between humans and the more-than-human world. Instead, we explore forms of interspecies solidarity, resistance, and care that emerge through cultural production.
The five papers map aesthetic and political strategies that both bear witness to environmental degradation as violence and reframe “violence” itself through an ecological lens. We ask: How do literature, documentary film, visual art, poetry, and museums mediate the entanglement of human and nonhuman histories of harm? What responsibilities and forms of response-ability arise from acknowledging ecological violence as a continuum rather than a rupture? By reading across disciplines and creative practices, we highlight the role of the cultural imagination in shaping ethical relationships with the more-than-human world. Susanne Knittel will focus on tribunal theatre as an ecodramaturgical form for exploring the limitations of the Western courtroom and the possibilities of multispecies justice, focusing on metatheatrical strategies that foreground the problem of excluded human and nonhuman voices. Ifor Duncan will consider river sediment as a dynamic and contested political materiality. Taking examples from research cases, I will consider how sediments are shaped into both islands where oppression takes place and spaces that disrupt its extractive and violent manipulation. Salomé Lopes Coelho will discuss how cinema constructs the memory of resource extraction as ecological violence with multispecies victims and distributes responsibility and guilt, taking as a case study the ongoing resistance in Covas do Barroso, Portugal, to the implementation of what is being called Europe’s largest lithium mine. Tom van Bunnik will reflect on ecopoetry’s capacity to articulate and cultivate multispecies forms of resistance, exploring the formal and tactical practices of sabotage at the interstices of human and more-than-human injustice. Sofia Lovegrove will examine recent changes in museological practices and narratives that place greater emphasis on implication in and accountability for violent colonial histories and ongoing social injustice, to reflect on the possibilities and the challenges of bringing an ecological perspective into reparative museology.
Bios:
Susanne C. Knittel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her current research revolves around the figure of the perpetrator in cultural memory and the cultural representation of the genocide-ecocide nexus. She is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination, which explores how cultural representations can make visible the links between eco-violence and other histories of violence, especially colonialism and genocide.
Ifor Duncan is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the EcoViolence ERC project at Utrecht University. His interdisciplinary research and art practice focuses on political violence in the contexts of devastated river systems and dispossessed communities. He approaches the weaponisation of rivers as borders, mega-dams, and as the mediums and dynamic archives of genocide through cultural memory and an audio-visual practice that involves submerged methods. Ifor has a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, where he was also Lecturer, and has been Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at NICHE, Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice.
Salomé Lopes Coelho is a researcher in film and art studies, working at the intersections of cinema, aesthetics, and the environmental humanities. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC project EcoViolence at Utrecht University, examining how contemporary cinema constructs the memory of large-scale mining as a form of ecological violence, foregrounds responsibility within extractive economies, and traces their entanglements with other histories of violence. Salomé holds a PhD in Artistic Studies from NOVA University Lisbon, where she was a visiting assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication Sciences.
Tom van Bunnik is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University on the ERC-funded EcoViolence project. His research focuses on the ways in which environmental degradation is framed as violence in contemporary ecopoetry and ecopoetics, and how representations of such eco-violence reflect on questions of guilt, implication, and responsibility. His work is situated within the fields of ecopoetics, ecocriticism, and cultural memory studies.
Sofia Lovegrove is a PhD candidate in the EcoViolence project and a cultural heritage practitioner working at the intersection of cultural memory, museums and critical heritage studies and decolonial critique and practices. For this project, Sofia examines how museums frame and remember past and present environmental degradation as violence and how they engage with their entanglements with violent colonial histories and their afterlives in the present.