The panels Ecologies of Violence: Memory and the More-Than-Human I-III 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.
Tom van Bunnik, Utrecht University - "Saboteurial Ecopoetics: Sabotage as Ecological Mnemonic Practice"
In this paper, I will explore ecopoetic practices that confront the ecological violence of petrocapitalist accumulation and circulation. Specifically, I will examine ‘sabotage’ as a mode of poiesis that offers formal and tactical strategies for dis- and reassembling fossil capital’s circuitry. I will do so through close readings of Stephen Collis’ collection Once in Blockadia (2016) and Juliana Spahr’s collection That Winter the Wolf Came (2015), both of which investigate barricades, blockades, and occupations at petrocapitalism’s ‘terminal landscapes’. I propose that these sites inspire poetic imaginaries of human and more-than-human resistance, through and in relation to the memories of shared vulnerabilities to histories of petrocapitalist violence. I hope to show how Collis and Spahr reconfigure sabotage as an ecological mnemonic practice that promises ‘multispecies justice’. Building on Alexandra Campbell and Fred Carter’s concept of ‘saboteurial poetics’ and inspired by Caroline Levine’s formalist approach to close reading, I suggest that the ecopoetics of Collis and Spahr fosters formal arrangements that may halt petrocapitalist accumulation and recircuit its infrastructures alternatively.
Sofía Forchieri, Radboud University Nijmegen "Laboratories of Relationality: Ecological Memory in Recent Latin American Museum Books" Decolonial, communitarian, and intersectional feminists have in recent years argued for the urgency of shifting to relational as opposed to categorial understandings of violence. Proposing concepts such as “entangled violences” (Gago 2019), “body territory” (Cabnal 2010, Paredes 2017), and “intersectional violence” (Collins 2023), these thinkers foreground the connections between colonial, ecological, racial, capitalist, and gendered violence. Recent cultural works and practices from Latin America make crucial contributions to this broader reconceptualization of violence by concretizing the abstract idea of relationality, by disrupting entrenched political strategies of visibilization through compartmentalization, and by imagining forms of solidarity that bridge racial, gender, and species divides. To achieve all this, a growing number of visual artists and writers mobilize museographic modes of collection and display in their work. Mariana López’s Museo (2018), Galo Ghigliotto’s El museo de la bruma (2019), Marcela Moraga’s Ni especias, ni especies: Crónica de la Patagonia (2019), and Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s La Compañía (2019) among others transform the medium of the book by adopting the logic of the museum. Framing these recent works as “museum books,” in this paper I seek to approach them as a distinct art form and to explore what possibilities they may harbor for tracing “ecologies of violence” (Knittel 2023) and for attesting to the entanglement of human and nonhuman histories of harm. Through an engagement with some of the above mentioned examples, I position recent museum books as laboratories of relationality where writers and artists experiment with relational or ecological modes of remembrance. I close my analysis with a reflection on the seemingly paradoxical move by which museum books enlist the logic and aesthetics of the museum – shaped by colonial mastery – to probe an alternative ecological memory.
Susanne Knittel, Utrecht University - "Performing Justice Beyond the Human: Tribunal Theatre and Ecologies of Violence" This paper will approach the question of ecologies of violence through the prism of theatre and ecodramaturgy. More specifically, it will focus on the aesthetic agency of tribunal theatre, a genre that has been part of the mnemonic repertoire of genocide and other atrocities, and that has seen a resurgence in the context of the ecocide discussion. I will discuss some recent examples of theatrical ecocide tribunals in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, many of which are collaborative, open-ended, and participatory performances – a cross-over of art, activism, and practice-based research. These performances, I will argue, explore how a more-than-human courtroom of the future could look like. They imagine alternative proceedings or conceptions of justice and aim to make room for voices that are marginalized and unheard in the traditional courtroom. I will zoom in on This Is Not A Trial, a performance I have been involved in staging with a transdisciplinary team based at Utrecht University. This performance stages a trial against a fictional Dutch company accused of ecocide in the context of nickel mining in Indonesia. I will discuss the practical and aesthetic challenges my team faced and reflect on the formal affordances and disaffordances of tribunal theatre for making visible ecologies of violence.
Paula Bertúa, CONICET/UNTREF/UBA - "From Subtraction to Explicitness: Entangled Memories of Ecoviolence in Argentinian Photography" The history of Latin American artistic practices is not unrelated to the extractivist and colonialist infrastructures that characterised different moments in the region’s history. From the “pigment route” in the colonial period to the search for rare earths in the current lithium triangle formed by Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, a journey can be traced through practices that have historically violated natural systems and the communities of human and non-human beings that inhabit these territories. In this development, modern photography would be the epitome of these destructive processes and, at the same time, their most flagrant repression: assumed to be a ‘clean’ technique, its black box has concealed the material conditions of production. Focusing on Argentine photography, in this presentation I will analyse the counterpoint between modern photography, its aesthetic and production forms, under the rule of the large photographic laboratories that were established in the region in the mid-20th century, and contemporary photography, based on decentralised practices and media exploration. I propose that these practices revise the history of the photographic medium itself through critical work with materials that makes the dynamics of violence explicit, configures alternative eco-territorial memories, and generates strategies for repairing these damaged worlds.
20260731T154520260731T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires10.9. Ecologies of Violence: Memory and the More-Than-Human IISV204MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
