Border Ecology by Ila Nicole Sheren

Author:Ila Nicole Sheren
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031259531
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Conclusions and New Questions

It may seem, at this point, that this chapter has been building toward a new materialist solution to the problem of depicting slow violence. Such an approach would seem to avoid the two pitfalls mentioned at the start of this chapter—coping with the durationality of slow violence while resisting narratives of victimhood. Indeed, Morton’s championing of a de-Romanticized ambience and Bennett’s turn toward the world of “things” can enable connections between eco-art and decolonial theory. All of the series I have discussed thus far—New Landscapes, Unregistered Cities, Scars & Borders, and Drowning World—capture the complexity of slow violence without reducing it to a series of clichés. The construction sites and refuse piles of the digitally altered photographs, the high-water marks of the floodlines, and the slow drone pan through alien territories all speak to the push and pull of development, human rights, and environmental conservation. All four series present the viewer with a radically altered landscape within which the slow, insidious violence of the Anthropocene is revealed.

The action of that reveal demands continued close examination. In the case of Yao Lu, the placid mountain scenes shift into piles of industrial refuse and debris of environmental extraction, and digital alteration exposes a new reality rather than obscuring it. The construction sites and refuse piles in New Landscapes and Unregistered Cities are equally indicative of the dynamic of Global South and Global North. After all, even the Eiffel Tower finds its way into latter series’ blighted cityscape. The problem is only exacerbated by the conditions of the developing world, regions in which rapid modernization is the key to economic growth, but that same modernization extracts an environmental toll. Mitra Azar works along similar lines, but adds in an element of ambience as seen through the detached mechanical eye of the drone. The disconnect between human operator and the agency of the drone itself grants the viewer an entirely new perspective on the landscapes, defamiliarizing the familiar and revealing the stratification of space. For Gideon Mendel, what is at first an uncanny staged image is revealed to be fact—an index of the floodwaters’ rise. The floods depicted by Mendel are the products of global climate change, dam-building, levee-ruptures, and river divergence that correlate with the acceleration of human intervention with the Earth. These artworks, in order to have the desired eco-critical effect, must work as part of larger series. A single image or video, while conveying a degree of information, cannot address the kind of broader connections that each series as a whole does. It is by reaching beyond a single circumstance, by making those South-South connections that Mosquera exhorts us to uncover, that these artworks give us a vocabulary with which to describe the ongoing violence of global inequality.

All four series, digitally manipulated or not, play with the ideas of scale, interconnection, and reveal. This act of revealing, however, demands continued close examination. After all, once one identifies the tarps surrounding Yao Lu’s mountainscapes, one delves deeper, wondering what else has been overlooked.

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