Iluminace 2/2023; (Eco)Traumatic Landscapes in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture
Guest editor: Bori Máté
Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2022
For this issue, we welcome proposals on the following topics or others considered pertinent in the context of this call within the fields of cinema, photography, and other visual arts:
- Landscapes of social and ecological traumas
- Landscapes as emotional archives
- Re-conceptualization of the representation of (eco)trauma
- Affect theory and (film) phenomenology in (audio) visual “representations” of (eco)trauma
- “New materialist” and non-linear approaches to agential matter
- Human and non-human agency
- Decolonial theory and trauma
- Artistic vs political images
- Conflicts of trauma representations and documentations
- Personal and collective consequences of (eco)trauma
- Photographing and filming hyperobjects
The advent of the Anthropocene epoch is marked by the emergence of so-called (eco)traumatic landscapes, which bear the tragic consequences of human intervention in the ecosystem. These landscapes are essentially defined by “hyperobjects,” a concept by which Timothy Morton refers to those human-manufactured things “that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” and are directly responsible for “the end of the world.” In geographical areas such as Chernobyl, Fukushima, or “Mar de plástico” in Almería (southern Spain), long-life plastic or nuclear materials exert long-term harmful effects not only on the surrounding primal, natural elements (like water, soil, air) but also on human and nonhuman life forms around. The damage played out by invisible nuclear, plastic, or agrochemical “perpetrators” over years and generations is a typical example of “slow violence,” a usual consequence of so-called “toxic geographies.” Rob Nixon’s idea of this specific form of violence associated with capitalism and industrialization calls our attention to the social consequences and human suffering present in these areas and environments; at the same time, slow violence broadens our traditional ideas of spatiotemporality and provokes artistic and theoretical questions about representation, visibility, medium specificity, but also agency and affectivity.
For further inspiration, see the literature cited at: https://www.iluminace.cz/index.php/en/submissions
Abstracts of the proposed studies of up to 200 words together with a short biography should be sent by September 30, 2022, to (lucie.cesalkova /at/ nfa.cz http://nfa.cz) and (barbatrukk1 /at/ gmail.com http://gmail.com). The authors will be informed of the decision by October 21, 2022. The deadline for submission of final studies is January 31, 2023. No payments are required.