Animales no humanos en el audiovisual contemporáneo: entre la narración y el instante suspendido (The paper will be given in English)
Daniel Jerónimo Tobón
En tiempos recientes han aparecido una serie de obras audiovisuales sobre animales no humanos que comparten un aire de familia: son obras que distienden la estructura dramática y el tiempo narrativo; que proveen potentes estímulos sonoros, visuales y kinestésicos; que incitan la empatía y una imaginación densa de los mundos animales. Se puede decir que exploran las posibilidades abiertas por la crisis de las narrativas clásicas para responder a las exigencias cruzadas, y a veces contradictorias, a las que se enfrenta cualquier intento de aumentar nuestra comprensión de los animales no humanos. De ahí que, además de compartir mucho, también tengan muchas diferencias: algunas convierten a sus sujetos en individuos, otras los transforman en oscuras masas; unas les dan una historia propia, con momentos de crisis y de giro, otras renuncian del todo a la narración y crean un tiempo suspendido (un perpetuo antes de la catástrofe). Unas miran con el animal, otras miran al animal y otras nos sumergen en el mundo animal.
Estas diferencias son particularmente relevantes si se considera que nuestra época está marcada por una creciente (y justificada) ansiedad ante la crisis ecológica global. Esta ansiedad tiñe nuestra percepción de este tipo de obras, y hace más punzantes ciertas preguntas ético-estéticas: ¿Conviene individualizar a los animales o, por el contrario, desindividualizar al espectador? ¿Para entenderlos y captar su sufrimiento debemos contemplarlos, implicarnos narrativamente con ellos, empatizar con sus sentimientos o enmarcar sus vidas en el contexto ecológico y económico que las determina? ¿Con la empatía y la compasión antropomorfizamos a los animales? ¿O más bien la negación de esa empatía es un mecanismo a través del cual se perpetúa la diferencia antropológica? ¿Hasta qué punto la ansiedad ecológica perturba o limita la comprensión de los animales que este tipo de películas pueden ofrecer?
Propongo que reflexionemos sobre estas preguntas tomando como punto de partida un documental y una instalación, que ofrecen entradas diferentes al mundo bovino, o incluso construyen mundos diferentes. El documental Cow (Arnold, 2021) sigue a Luma, una vaca lechera, durante cuatro años de su vida en una granja industrializada en el Reino Unido. La instalación Sacrificio (Echeverri, 2011) ofrece una experiencia inmersiva a través de las imágenes y los sonidos de las reses que entran en el matadero.
¿Aprender de las catástrofes?
Gerard Vilar
La vida de nuestra especie se ha visto golpeada por terremotos, cambios climáticos,
pandemias, guerras y crisis especiales de toda suerte. Hemos aprendido que algunas
cosas dependen de nosotros y otras no. Desde que empezó la revolución científica y se
abrió camino la secularización y la creencia en el progreso, la pregunta por si
aprenderemos de las catástrofes ha adquirido pleno sentido, aunque no se haya
planteado con suficiente seriedad salvo, quizás, en los años inmediatamente posteriores
a la II Guerra Mundial. Hegel, cuya filosofía se resume en creer que el espíritu colectivo
de la humanidad se ha pasado toda la historia aprendiendo a través de experiencia
negativas, o Habermas que cree que la historia es la del despliegue de los procesos de
aprendizaje posibilitados por la razón comunicativa, encuentran en Lyotard, en la senda
de Kant, un grado de escepticismo suficiente sin abandonar toda esperanza ni el
imperativo de la justicia. “Cada época sueña la siguiente”, escribió Michelet. Nuestro
sueño es una pesadilla apocalíptica. Para cambiar la pesadilla tenemos necesidad de
pensar de otras maneras. La aportación de las artes a aprender de los procesos de crisis
y catástrofe es fundamental. Las artes contemporáneas nos ofrece algunos ejemplos de
ello.
‘Reading Hamlet in a Time of Crisis’
Miguel de Beistegui
In this paper, I will introduce different ‘regimes’ of crisis and explore them through
Hamlet. I will begin by presenting Hamlet as a crisis of pollution, and thus by establishing a
(somewhat uncontroversial) connection between Shakespeare’s play and Greek tragedy.
I will then turn to Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into
the Play (1956). In that late text, which is largely (but not exclusively) a confrontation with
Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Schmitt reads Hamlet as
embodying the state of exception. He argues that the tragic element of the play resides in its
ability to present real historical time in the form of myth and, at the same time, to represent
the essence of the political (or sovereignty) understood as the moment of decision regarding
the state of exception. In that respect, Schmitt reads Hamlet as a genuinely legal and political
response to ‘mere’ play, and to dramas of pollution and revenge.
Finally, I will turn to Derrida’s singular reading of Hamlet (and indirectly Marx) in
Specters of Marx (1993). That reading, which focuses on the ghostly figure of the King, and
on spectrality more generally, can be read as providing an alternative to the paradigm – the
theory, philosophy, and politics – of crisis, whether understood as exception (Schmitt) or
contradiction (Marx). My claim is that Derrida tries to free a space of thought and action
rooted in a different experience of singularity, which he calls Justice, and a different time,
which he calls messianic. If one can still characterise the event of singularity as a crisis, it is in
aporetic sense, and in the (in Derrida’s view) irreducible tension between right (or law) and
justice.
Pollution, exception and aporia will therefore be the three regimes, economies and
temporalities of crisis I will be investigating. I will conclude with critical remarks on Schmitt
and Derrida.
Presentation of the curatorial project entitled Multispecies Imaginaries: The Art of Living in a Contingent, Uncertain World (La Capella Art Centre, Barcelona, 2022).
Christian Alonso
The precarization of life in our technologically mediated societies requires rethinking the coexistence between species, demands embracing an ethico-political conception of subjectivity, and encourages us to realize heterogeneous communities based on common well-being. In Multispecies Imaginaries, artists immerse themselves in the worlds of microorganisms, plants, animals, and fungi, expressing that we interact with other beings in a constitutive and consequential way, and inviting us to develop trans-species modes of hospitality and care.
Furthr info: https://www.lacapella.barcelona/en/multispecies-imaginaries-art-living-contingent-uncertain-world
Krakatoa,
a project by Carlos Casas
Idea: Krakatoa takes as its starting point, the 1883 eruption of the Indonesian Krakatoa volcano.
– the most catastrophic eruption ever recorded. This eruption changed our understanding of the earth as an ecosystem, and established the modern imaginary of apocalyptic natural disa- sters. The project, which addresses subjects such as extinction, nature stagnation, ecological annihilation, collapse of nature and biodiversity, asks us to play close attention to the impact of climate change and look at the global fallout from environmental disasters.
Synopsis: The film narrates the last day of Kesuma, a Bagan fisherman, who survives living out on his bamboo fishing platform a few kilometers away from the volcanic island of Krakatoa. After a hard night’s fishing session, Kesuma spends his day exhausted repairing his nets and caring for his platform. Without any warning, there is a giant explosion and a tsunami engulfs everything. The film is turned upside down. Kesuma wakes up on a deserted mysterious island. He is now a castaway. After exploring a bit of the island, an encountering other survivor species, he finds a cave in which he can take refuge, and prepare for the ultimate sacrifice. Nothing can prepare Kesuma or the spectator for what is coming.
Director`s note: Krakatoa is an hybrid film, composed of a speculative fiction, documentary sonic narrative and abstract scientific imaging. Working from a sonic reconstruction of the 1883 eruption and mixing it with testimony account of a survivor of the last eruption of Krakatoa in 2018; the film explores the sensorial affect possibilities of film as medium and explores ways of introducing audiences with new ways of empathy with our environment through abstract audiovisual embodiment. The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 has been considered one of the most devastating natural phenomena in human history, also considered to be the loudest natural noise produced by earth in recorded history. The Krakatoa eruption produced some of the most remarkable natural sightings, its impact could be seen all over the world and changed weather and sky conditions around the planet. But beyond its meteorological, geological and biological influence, the eruption and subsequent disaster changed our notions of nature and our connection to it. The Krakatoa woke old notions of the apocalypse and brought fresh new images and accounts to feed and create a new imaginary of the end of the world.
The film tries to answer some questions: Can innovative film narratives and experimental image and sound techniques provide a possible break to the stagnation of the climate crisis, can it pro- vide new insights and notions that illuminate theories of the anthropocene? How can we com- municate a new connectedness and embodiment with the planet, expanding notions of how we see and care for it? Expanding notions of what we understand as Gaia. How do we develop new cinematic sensitivities according to this – creating a work in between fiction, documentary and abstract / experimental cinema?
How can we propose new ways of connecting with our environment? I am interested in a mix of geo-humanities and the science of the terrestrial. Is the volcano our way of understanding the crosssection of the critical zones to better understand its interconnections? Can a volcano be a gate to an ultimate inner journey that questions us and our relation to our planet – an inverted cosmology perhaps?
Art and political ecology. Artistic responses to collapse
Paula Bruna
Collapse of contemporary societies has aroused an increasing interest in recent years, given the emergency of environmental conflicts and their consequences in society. Art, like other areas of knowledge, addresses the challenge of achieving a sustainable society as an alternative to collapse. However, there are two different currents regarding the meaning of sustainability: weak sustainability (objective of environmental policies) and strong sustainability (defended by political ecology). Based on these two theories of sustainability, examples of artistic projects conceptually related to the different degrees of sustainability and ecological awareness (ecognosis) are presented, concluding that the promotion of strong sustainability proposals is urgently needed. In this context, transgression of anthropocentrism becomes necessary for shifting the paradigm towards a sustainable one. Some of my artistic practices will be exposed as applied cases that search to promote imaginaries of coexistence.
Time and its Images 