These panels Ecologies of Violence: Memory and the More-Than-Human I-II take 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 panels examine what aesthetic and political strategies emerge through cultural practices. These strategies aim to 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 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, incorporating non-human agency and material conditions? What responsibilities and forms of response-ability arise from acknowledging ecological violence as a continuum rather than a rupture, and expanding victim/witness notions? How can posthumanist perspectives reshape historical narratives of ecological harm, fostering alternative eco-territorial memories and repair? By reading across disciplines and creative practices, we highlight the role of the cultural imagination in shaping ethical relationships with more-than-human worlds.
Ifor Duncan, Utrecht University, "Aesthetics of Ecological Violence: Art Practices and the More-than-Human" In this paper I will begin to map the field of aesthetic practices that tackle conditions of ecological violence. These repertoires include investigation and documentary, moving image, performance, and material installation (and their intersections). I will focus on specific examples in which practices engage with the question of memory in the ecological relation between humans and more-than-humans. This includes, firstly, the case of Forensic Architecture’s investigations in Namibia, where territories are archives of historic and contemporary practices of genocide/ecocide. Secondly, Thandi Loewenson’s video and graphite drawing/etching installation in her work The Uhuru Catalogues (2023). And thirdly, Sami Baloji’s installation … and to those North Sea waves whispering sunken stories (2021) that folds together historic marine weapons dumping and the experience of a Congolese soldier in WWI. Each example mobilizes an ecology of practices necessary to encompass the complex, temporal, spatial and mnemonic imbrications present in the examination of ecological violence. Building on TJ Demos’s project on the Tears of Justice, where he asks how ‘contemporary artistic practices interrogate and reimagine the meaning of justice,’ this paper reflects on what it means to practice ecologically in the context of devastated ecologies.
Salomé Lopes Coelho, Utrecht University - "Cinematic Ecologies of Violence: The Memory of Extractivism and its Resistances"
This presentation examines how contemporary cinema constructs the memory of large-scale mining as ecological violence. I focus on films engaging with the ongoing mining conflicts in Covas do Barroso, Portugal, where local communities have resisted the establishment of an open-pit lithium mine for nearly a decade. My analysis centres on a set of documentaries, from collaborative to experimental, that address these territories and the violent efforts to dismantle their land-based knowledge systems, practices, and relationships essential to local life. These works expose the complicity of states, corporations, and consumers, while rethinking responsibility and justice across human and more-than-human worlds. The analysis also points to intersections with lithium extraction in the Andean Puna, suggesting a transnational continuity of extractive violence underlying the so-called global green transition.
I investigate how cinema functions as an aesthetic and political practice against the repression or forgetting of ecological violence, and how cinematic atmospheres render extractivism perceptible as violence, expanding the scope of victim and witness beyond the human. The paper argues that these cinematic operations enact affective encounters with environmental destruction and its resistances, constructing mnemonic spaces where ecological violence is both registered and contested. These films, from production to reception, reconfigure how environmental harm is perceived and remembered, foregrounding cinematic worlds and their capacity to shape collective memory and political responses within contemporary ecologies of violence.
Guadalupe Lucero, Buenos Aires University, "Bones, Sea and Memory: Ecologies of Violence in Post-dictatorship Argentina" The Argentine coast in 1977 became a focal point for a more-than-human narrative, defined by the sea’s agency in the reappearance of the bodies of the detained-disappeared. Initially buried as NN, these bodies began to be identified through the work of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF). Thus, through a singular alliance between scientists, forensic techniques, and the bones themselves, the story of their disappearance and reappearance emerged. In this paper, I analyse how the sea operates not as a mere backdrop but as a crucial agent that acts and becomes a witness and co-narrator of history. Through the study of the cases of the bodies found in Santa Teresita during the last military dictatorship, we propose to map the narrative thread that connects bones, the ocean, and humans in an entangled memory. We examine how this more-than-human perspective reconfigures our understanding of testimony, evidence, and justice, destabilising the notion of victim and witness to include non-human actors in the process of memory and resistance against oblivion.
Lee Douglas, Goldsmiths University of London "Phantom Ecologies, Forest Fabulations: Ecological Memory and the Remaking of Galicia’s Burning Landscapes" Since 2017, Galician forest fires have acquired a new name: megafires. The term speaks to their unprecedented scale, fuelled by the water thirsty, highly combustible eucalyptus trees that characterize local landscapes. While the severity of the ecological devastation produced by these fires and their associated monocultures is unprecedented, their roots reach back to twentieth century Spanish experiments with fascism, imperialism and capitalist modernisation, specifically to the Franco dictatorship’s embrace of eucalyptus to rapidly industrialize impoverished rural areas hard hit by political violence and economic repression. Drawing on long term engagement Spanish memory politics and its visual culture, this paper describes how present day responses to Galicia’s burning landscapes are entangled with memory practices that narrate human and more than human forms of relation embedded in and experienced through landscape. To do this, I trace the emergence of Galician eco cinema, arguing that more than human relations in Galician language films—like Oliver Laxe’s O que arde (2019) and Rodrigo Sorogoyan’s As Bestas (2022)—are politically potent points of entry for understanding the urgency of contemporary megafires and the enduring silences regarding the inalterable ways in which Spain’s fascist project altered landscapes, community relationships, and forms of commoning integral to both. In doing so, I track how forest landscapes and their contemporary devastation are narrated on screen and how these cinematic representations relate to forms of ecological action, particularly deseucaliptización—the collective eradication of eucalyptus from Galician forests and plantations. Following the intersections and tensions between cinematic form and local landscape practices, I argue that more than human forms of relation cannot be disentangled from contemporary memory politics, where silence and forgetting permeate how communities engage with local landscapes and their phantom ecologies.
20260731T140020260731T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires9.8. Ecologies of Violence: Memory and the More-Than-Human ISV204MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
