When: Friday, June 2, 2023, 4:30 PM - 7:30 PMWhere: BLOC Cinema, ArtsOne Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
Focusing our attention on the material residue of war and the environmental imagination that it produces, this event is organised around a conversation on the nature of war, the war on nature, and the inevitable contamination of the two concepts, which are becoming increasingly tangled. The event is dedicated to thinking of natural elements, the atmosphere, biome and organic matter as a modality intrinsic to the execution of military violence. It brings together writers, researchers and filmmakers to collaboratively interrogate the environmental ramifications of armed conflict and to speculatively examine the knowledge and imagination emanating from the residues of war.
War doesn’t end with the silencing of gunshots. Its residue lingers and echoes in the atmosphere, soil, blood and tissue.
If armed conflict is often caught by visual media as an image of a flashing explosion, its long tail is mediated through material remnants and leftovers, whose vibrant matter and traces shape the outlines of future conflicts and continue as vectors of history, toxicity, and waste. Such debris can be spectacularly visible or imperceptible to the naked eye, solid as metal shells or defused as carbon dioxide in the stratosphere, enormous or microscopic. No longer separable from the environment, debris and residue participate in its co-production, turning "nature" into the very media of war.
The participants are IHSS Fellows Yasmin Fedda, Benjamin Neimark and Daniel Mann and Helene Kazan and Emily Jacir
With a special film screen of a ‘Letter to a Friend’ by Emily Jacir.
All are welcome, but please book via Eventbrite to join.