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Over the past two years our visual landscapes are increasingly saturated with scenes of multiple violences, distant and close, fast and slow. Wars and ecocides are mediated through the proliferation of screens, which connect us to only separate us more. With every instance each of us might or might not be able to relate. As scholars and artists we ask: what symbolic work is capable of doing justice, if ever? What kind of storytelling?
This lecture will center on topics of witnessing, registering, and evidence in relation to current environmental and humanitarian crises. If the paradigm of modern warfare, as Sloterdijk argued, was to target not an individual, but her environment— to make her air not breathable, and her land not habitable, — the lecture will address the urgency of reading such an environment as witnesses. The audience will be introduced to recent concepts, such as ‘material witness’ (S.Schuppli), ‘labor of witnessing’ (S.Matviyenko, A.Bazdyrieva), ‘more-than-human witness’ (Sheila Sheikh), and ‘terror environment’ (S.Matviyenko). This will frame and situate the topics of slow violence, atmospheres of conflict (the environmental aspect of the war; and militant aspect of climate politics); erasure (kinetic and epistemic), and then, ultimately, this will lead to the question of witnessing and the urgency in developing its expanded understanding and its material aspects.
Asia Bazdyrieva is a scholar and writer with a background in art history and analytical chemistry. Her main interest is in the relationship between natural sciences and their seemingly neutral techniques, and the production of imaginaries that span social strata, while shaping politics and poetics of the earth. In 2018-2022, she co-authored ‘Geocinema’ — a collaborative project exploring the infrastructures for earth observation as co-producing forms of cinema. Bazdyrieva was a Fulbright scholar in 2015-2017 at The City University of New York, and Digital Earth fellow in 2018-2019; she was also a research fellow at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She is currently pursuing her PhD at The University of Applied Arts Vienna, and serves as an advisor in the Advisory Board of the transmediale festival in Berlin.
Photo credit: Hanna Hrabarska
