In the age of advanced technology, the earth could be read as if it were a script that needs to be interpreted—a trace of its own past and future. This recalls traditional beliefs in animistic nature and begs the question: What are the political implications of recognizing that everything—including rocks, garbage, polluted air, volcanic deserts, the oceans—is alive? The films in Part Four of the series Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities, and Environmental Memory probe the limits and potentials of visualizing the wasted, the inanimate, and the geological. The Otolith Group’s Medium Earth (2013), Ernst Karel, Toby Lee, and Pawel Wojtasik’s Single Stream (2014),Malena Szlam’s Altiplano (2018), Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira’s 4 Waters, Deep Implicancy (2018), and Zlatko Ćosić’s Un-Pollute (2017) examine images of vibrant matter composed by a complex web of active bodies and materials.
Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities, and Environmental Memory is an online series of film programs and discussions on e-flux Video & Film, programmed by Lukas Brasiskis.
The films in Part Four | Reading the Earth: Vibrant Matter and Human Hubris will screen for two weeks from Sunday, September 27 though Saturday, October 10, 2020. Subsequent parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Sunday.
Part Four also includes Visualizing the Anthropocene: Aesthetics and Politics, an online discussion with T.J. Demos, Toby Lee, Sasha Litvintseva, and Susana de Sousa Dias, moderated by Lukas Brasiskis. The discussion will livestream on Thursday, October 1, 2020 at 1pm EST.