Abstract
“Landscapes of Slow Violence” analyzes digital photographs and video of environmental devastation and urban development in the Global South. Case studies include the digitally manipulated landscapes of Chinese photographers Yao Lu (New Landscapes, 2007–2010) and Jiang Pengyi (Unregistered Cities, 2008–2010), drone-enabled video pieces from Sardinian-born Mitra Azar (Scars & Borders, 2016), as well as the more straightforward, almost photojournalistic series of South African-born Gideon Mendel (Drowning World, 2007–2010). I analyze these works in terms of Rob Nixon’s theory of “slow violence,” which describes the uneven impact of climate change on the global poor. The object-oriented, thing-centric philosophies discussed in the first two chapters now read through the lens of slow violence, resulting in a troubling elision of lived experience and local knowledges. Ultimately, the desire to reduce the world to a series of objects may eliminate hierarchies, but in doing so, it erases the often problematic histories once encoded in those hierarchies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Parmesan, C., et al. “Poleward shifts in geographical ranges of butterfly species associated with regional warming,” Nature 399 (1999), 579–583.
- 2.
For a legal perspective on the “assisted migration” debate, see Alejandro E. Camacho, “Assisted Migration: Redefining Nature and Natural Resource Law under Climate Change,” Yale Journal on Regulation 27 (2010), 171–255.
- 3.
See Epstein, P., et al. “Biological and physical signs of climate change: focus on mosquito borne diseases,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 79 (1998), 409–417.
- 4.
For 2016 maps showing the extent of each species’ range, see https://www.cdc.gov/zika/vector/range.html.
- 5.
For more information on this categorization, see Marta Szczepanik, “The ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’” Refugees? Imagined Refugeehood(s) in the Media Coverage of the Migration Crisis” Journal of Identity and Migration Studies Vol 10, No. 2 (2016): 23–33. Note that Szczepanik only deals with the Syrian refugee crisis, but her study of media rhetoric applies to climate refugees as well.
- 6.
T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), 55–58.
- 7.
Ibid., 69.
- 8.
Ibid., 93.
- 9.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2013), 2.
- 10.
Ibid., 15.
- 11.
Gerardo Mosquera, “Walking with the Devil: Notes on Art, Culture, and Internationalization,” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Latin American and Latino Art, eds. Robin Greeley and Alejandro Anreus (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). Also available online: http://www.gdmoa.org/zhanlan/threeyear/4/24/12/12374.jsp.
- 12.
This is only an estimate. Yao’s photographs are an amalgamation of different traditions and periods within the history of Chinese landscape and genre painting and should not be viewed as evocations of a single specific era. I have chosen to highlight some similarities to the Qing-era landscapes, but this is by no means the sole association.
- 13.
Zhao et al. “The 7-Decade Degradation of a Large Freshwater Lake in Central Yangtze River, China,” Environmental Science & Technology 2005 39 (2), 431–436.
- 14.
Ibid. Note that the decline of the Baiji Dolphin population was one of the Chinese memories recorded in What is Missing?
- 15.
The full quote is as follows, and I find it resonates with Yao’s series as a whole: “How have divine landscapes, the saintly mountain and the sea with the innumerable smiles of the gods, how have they been transformed into sewage farms or horrifying dum** grounds for corpses? By scattering material and sensory garbage, we are covering or erasing the world’s beauty and reducing the luxurious proliferation of its multiplicities to the desert and solar uniformity of our laws alone.” Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, Trans. Elisabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 24.
- 16.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2014), 1.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution?, trans Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 53.
- 19.
Ibid., 50.
- 20.
Recall Mestaoui’s use of the Eiffel Tower as canvas for her digital projection in Chap. 2. The tower’s initial purpose in radio broadcasting becomes relevant here, as artists use its iconic shape to amplify their own communications.
- 21.
Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Zed Books, 1997), 13.
- 22.
Ibid., 76.
- 23.
Harvey uses this phrase throughout his work, particularly Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (Verso, 2006).
- 24.
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (Verso, 2006), 39.
- 25.
Brundtland, quoted in Rist, 181. Global efforts followed, inaugurating the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in June 1992, a global initiative that would become the forerunner to “innovation-focused” events such as the COP 21 summit in Paris in 2015.
- 26.
Rist, 187.
- 27.
Morton, 2007, 140–142.
- 28.
Ibid., 164.
- 29.
Ibid., 142.
- 30.
“Malaysia extends bauxite mining ban until mid-2017,” Reuters, March 27, 2017. Online. http://www.reuters.com/article/malaysia-bauxite-idUSL3N1H51L0. Accessed May 15, 2017.
- 31.
For a review of the uses of bauxite and other so-called proppants, see Liang et al., “A comprehensive review on proppant technologies” Petroleum vol. 2, no. 1 (March 2016): 26–39.
- 32.
Mameli et al., “Geological, Geochemical and Mineralogical Features of Some Bauxite Deposits from Nurra (Western Sardinia, Italy): Insights on Conditions of Formation and Parental Affinity,” International Journal of Earth Science 96 (2007), 891.
- 33.
Varrica et al., “Metals and Metalloids in Hair Samples of Children Living Near the Abandoned Mine Sites of Sulcis-Inglesiente (Sardinia, Italy),” Environmental Research 134 (2014), 373.
- 34.
Alexander Streitberger, “Futures Past: Imbricated Temporalities in Contemporary Panoramic Video Art,” The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Brianne Cohen and Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2016), 46.
- 35.
Ibid., 49.
- 36.
Mitra Azar, “Anecdotes of life and aphorisms of thought” Talk given at Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art, 1st International Symposium. Barcelona, Spain. December 1, 2016.
- 37.
Terry Smith, “Cotemporality, Intermediality: Time and Medium in Contemporary Art” in The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Brianne Cohen and Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2016), 23.
- 38.
Bolette B. Blaagaard, “The Aesthetics of Posthuman Experience: The Presence of Journalistic, Citizen-generated and Drone Imagery,” Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication, 10(1) (2015), 60–61.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Ibid., 62.
- 41.
Mark Andrejevic, “Becoming Drones: Smartphone Probes and Distributed Sensing,” Locative Media, ed. Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin (Routledge, 2015), 202.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Gideon Mendel, Drowning World, online, http://gideonmendel.com/submerged-portraits/.
- 44.
Agnes Petho, “Figurations of the Photofilmic: Stillness versus Motion—Stillness in Motion,” The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Brianne Cohen and Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2016), 246.
- 45.
Nixon, 21.
- 46.
Nixon, 165. China’s Three Gorges Dam, for example, led to the forced resettlement of more than 1.2 million people, turning in them into what Nixon evocatively termed “spectral uninhabitants.” Other nations, such as Thailand, have placed a moratorium on dam-building, all the while actively constructing hydroelectric dams in neighboring countries.
- 47.
Mendel, Drowning World, online, http://gideonmendel.com/floodlines/.
- 48.
Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What it’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 40.
- 49.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 4.
- 50.
Bennett, 5.
- 51.
Brianne Cohen, “Eco-aesthetics, Massacres, and the Photofilmic,” The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Brianne Cohen and Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2016), 65.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sheren, I.N. (2023). Landscapes of Slow Violence. In: Border Ecology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-25952-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-25953-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)