Session: 5d
Time: 11.30–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.18
Chair: Salomé Lopes Coelho
Panel description: This panel explores the role of minerals in the imagination of more-than-human communities and the part aesthetic practices play in reconfiguring multispecies justice. Marginalised by a bias that privileges organic life over the self-organisation of inorganic matter, minerals and stones are relegated to the bottom of ontological and ethical hierarchies, treated as inert or extractable. Yet they are active materialities in worldmaking processes, and art can expose and revalue their agencies. Bringing together work on experimental cinema, contemporary visual art, poetry, and performance, the papers foreground how diverse artistic practices render minerals visible as participants in shared worlds and intervene in the perceptual and affective limits imposed by human- and organic-centric regimes of value. From copper’s toxic residues to rare earths and polymetallic nodules, from chalk’s disintegrity to photochemical mineral correspondences in 16mm film, the panel traces how aesthetic strategies unsettle anthropocentric frames, resist racialised regimes of extraction, and refigure the place of the inorganic in more-than-human communities. Together, these contributions ask how aesthetic and literary practices can both expose violent histories of mineral exploitation and cultivate geopoetic imaginaries of resistance and relation.
Mariana Cunha (University of Westminster), “Telluric Cinema: Malena Szlam’s Altiplano (2018) and Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya (2024)”
Abstract: Mariana Cunha will examine the radical possibilities of a telluric cinema through Malena Szlam’s films Altiplano (2018) and Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya (2024). Beginning with an investigation of ‘surface’—geological, archaeological, topographical, and cinematic—the presentation explores Szlam’s work as both geological archive and resistive practice against extractivist logics. Szlam’s employment of 16mm film and in-camera editing creates a material correspondence between film emulsion and mineral substrates, enacting a geopoetic gesture that bridges cinematic and geological materialities. The films’ photochemical accidents position cinema itself as a geological force. Repurposing the landscape trope central to avant-garde cinema and land art, Szlam radically activates mineral agencies and nonhuman temporalities while foregrounding complex interspecies entanglements—the mycorrhizal networks, bacterial communities, and symbiotic relationships that constitute ecological webs beyond human perception. Telluric cinema functions as both aesthetic and political intervention, rendering visible humans’ extractive traces and colonial histories, thereby cultivating new forms of geological consciousness for our more-than-human present.
Bio: Mariana Cunha is a researcher, curator, and senior lecturer at the University of Westminster and the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM). Her research explores the epistemic and decolonial potentialities of ecological practices in contemporary art and moving images from the Global South. She holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. She has published on Latin American and global cinemas, as well as nonfiction film practices. Her practice research includes co-curating the exhibitions We Live Like Trees Inside the Footsteps of Our Ancestors and Liminal Ecologies: Thresholds of Transition and Entanglement.
Rosa Berbel (University of Granada), “Copper Aesthetics in Contemporary Chilean Poetry”
Abstract: Rosa Berbel will examine the emergence of a “copper aesthetics” in contemporary Chilean poetry, exploring how mining industry and extractivism surface in recent texts and unsettle conventional notions of what poetry can record, figure, or imagine in the Anthropocene. These works engage with the toxic residues of copper production—such as tailings and particulate matter—not as inert by-products but as aesthetic and political materials that generate spectral, residual landscapes. In doing so, these poetics challenge the transparency of language while exposing the impact of extractive logics on territory, temporality, bodies, and human and more-than-human communities. This perspective makes it possible to situate “copper aesthetics” within the broader panorama of geopoetics, lithic poetics, and fossil poetics in Latin American production, which open up new relations with the inorganic world.
Bio: Rosa Berbel is a doctoral researcher at the University of Granada, where she is completing her PhD. Her research focuses on Latin American poetry, ecocriticism, and the intersections between poetry and politics. She holds a degree in Comparative Literature (2019) from the University of Granada and serves as Managing Editor of Revista Letral (Q1). She has been a visiting researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (2023) and at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (2024).
HC. Krempels (University of Westminster), “The Lithic Other: Exploring Nonhuman Vitality and Personhood through ‘Consensual’ Performance Collaborations with Chalk”
Abstract: HC. Krempels will present ongoing arts research that explores notions of nonhuman vitality and personhood through ‘consensual’ performance collaborations with the lithic other, chalk. While recent EH thinking asks us to (re)consider the animacies of geologies and geographies beyond conventional materialist conceptions of deadened matter, it urges us towards the ‘liveliness’ (van Dooren and Rose, 2016) of others such as stones, via mediums such as touch (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Chalk, however, appears to resist our contemporary conceptions of animacy, vitality (and thereby mortality) as well as individuality. Not only is chalk composed of the skeletal remains of coccolythophores–in other words, the bones of the many dead–but it also complicates contemporary Western scholarship around agency and ‘personhood’ (to utilise the language of New Animism) through its characteristic disintegrity: chalk dismantles as it touches, marks as it is marked; chalk deposits itself onto and upon contact with another; chalk yields itself to water, fragments into many, breaches our concepts of dead and alive. How, then, can we (re)conceive of chalk on its own terms? In what ways does consensual sensory contact with chalk broaden our notions of individuality, stability or liveliness, and in what ways does it resist them?
Bio: HC. Krempels is a poly-media performance-maker and PhD candidate at CREAM, University of Westminster. He has worked across written word, theatre, film, photography and audio and was the founder of London-based Theatre Anima, a collective working in the realms of experimental performance and interested in the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. His writings have been commissioned by BBC Radio 4, VICE, and the Guardian, amongst others. His performance-based research is at the intersection of environmental philosophy and animist arts praxis, with particular focus on inter-agent collaborations.