Table of Contents
Introduction
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From Blackness to Black Ecologies
Mateusz Chaberski, Małgorzata Sugiera
citationMateusz Chaberski, Małgorzata Sugiera, ”From Blackness to Black Ecologies”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.3006Introduction to the thematic issue: black ecologies.
keywords: black ecologies; blackness; re-membering; broken earths
Viewpoint
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From Black Coal to Black Earth
Alexandra Clod, Karolina Uskakovych
citationAlexandra Clod, Karolina Uskakovych, ”From Black Coal to Black Earth”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2967A visual essay presenting the works and collaboration of Karolina Uskakovych and Alexandra Clod.
keywords: community gardens; history of industrialization; post-industrial heritage; identity and history; comparative artistic research
Perspectives
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From Black Silesia to Green Coal
Marta Tomczok
citationMarta Tomczok, ”From Black Silesia to Green Coal”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2981The author analyzes the colors of visual art related to Upper Silesia, assuming that a new look at the coal region, drawing on post-humanities, requires reevaluating the current understanding of colors used by artists and photographers in the past. Considering the ideological division into black, white, and green Silesia, the author looks at its pre-war and post-war photographs, then at the Carboniferous paintings of Ludwik Holesz and the post-industrial murals of Mona Tusz. The context of the sketch is the author's own experiences, born in Upper Silesia at the end of the 20th century, as well as the experiences of street art in Australian mining regions.
keywords: Carboniferous Era, Ludwik Holesz, colored coal, mural
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A Lullaby for Dolores
Ewa Wziętek
citationEwa Wziętek, ”A Lullaby for Dolores”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2973A detailed description of the Dolores - panna na wydaniu [Dolores - girl to spend on / Dolores - girl on the way out] project and an attempt to place it in a broader ecological context.
keywords: energy transition; post-industrial heritage; mining machinery; dark ecology
Close Up
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Insurgent Geology. A Billion Black Anthropocenes Now!
Kathryn Yusoff
citationKathryn Yusoff , ”Insurgent Geology. A Billion Black Anthropocenes Now!”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.3002Polish translation of the chapter “Insurgent Geology. A Billion Black Anthropocenes Now!” from Kathryn Yusoff’s book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. The chapter problematizes racist discourses and practices of geology which transformed Black bodies into fungible matter. The author, however, does not aim to give the oppressed a voice as liberal political subjects. She convincingly argues that close, often intimate relations between Black bodies and inhuman matter may bring about practices of resistance and insurgence alternative to modes of political agency dominant in “white” Western modernity.
keywords: Black Anthropocene; White Geology; Black Geophysics; geoaesthetics; inhumanities
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New Nature
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
citationAnna Lowenhaupt Tsing, ”New Nature”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2977The article focuses on what the author calls “the new nature,” that is, nature shaped by human action and its non-designed feral effects. As the new nature not only refuses the distinction between domestic and wild, but also falls through the cracks between academic disciplines, it is still neglected by scholars, even those who study global and local phenomena of the Anthropocene. Referring to her fruitful collaborations at the intersection of anthropology and the visual arts, especially in the case of the digital project Feral Atlas, the author proves that collaboration across academic disciplines helps to develop new forms of analytical approaches. In this context, she introduces four conceptual guidelines for the interdisciplinary of the new nature and elaborate on them one by one, employing well-chosen examples from the contributions gathered in Feral Atlas.
keywords: the new nature; the Anthropocene; feral effects; collaboration across academic disciplines
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Re-Membering Bodies in Black Ecologies: Elżbieta Łapczyńska’s Bestiariusz nowohucki
Mateusz Borowski
citationMateusz Borowski, ”Re-Membering Bodies in Black Ecologies”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2993The article offers a close reading of Elżbieta Łapczyńska’s Bestiariusz nowohucki (2020), a collection of short stories set in the time of the construction of Nowa Huta, an industrial district of Kraków, built in the early 1950s as a socialist new city. The interpretation is set in the context of the problems raised today by environmental humanities, which seek ways of stepping outside the binary of natural and civilizational forces, in search of ways of recounting the past which open up futures beyond the myth of return to pristine nature. The article posits that in Łapczyńska’s collection Nowa Huta is depicted as a black ecology, defined by the philosopher Levi R. Bryant as a speculative view of relationships between entities composing environment that decenters human perspective and invites an exploration of how “societies are themselves ecologies … embedded in the broader ecologies of the natural world”. With reference to Karen Barad’s notion of re-membering, the article identifies in the literary material in question an attempt at representing the past of Nowa Huta as a black ecology in terms of a non-human memory, that questions the linearity of time as a basis of post-apocalyptic narratives. This problem is approached from a doubly situated perspective: the interpretation of Bestiariusz nowohucki is set in the context of the current ecological predicament in Nowa Huta and the author’s experiences of growing up in the area in the 1980s, in times of both political unrest and ecological emergency.
keywords: speculative fabulation; re-membering; Nowa Huta; black ecology, green humanities
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Of an Ongoing Past: Stories of and from Black City
Małgorzata Sugiera
citationMałgorzata Sugiera, ”Of an Ongoing Past: Stories of and from Black City”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2998The article responds to T. J. Demos’s recent call in Radical Futurisms to render traditions of the oppressed in plural which in no way has to be identified with ‘colour blindness.’ This means that we must learn to identify not only the billion Black Anthropocenes that Kathryn Yusoff postulated several years ago, but also those extractivist practices and their current black ecologies that have been largely underappreciated in contemporary (eco)critical discourses, particularly with regard to specific variants of Western modernity and its aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe. Mindful of that, this article focuses on a recent trilogy by a young Polish novelist Marta Knopik. In all three novels the action is set in Black City that may be fictional, but it also refers to the actually existing Upper Silesia, a region in Central Europe with a long history of coal mining and heavy industry. As the proposed reading shows, the detrimental impacts of colonial extractivism are best captured locally, in specific entanglements of an ongoing past, present and future.
keywords: traditions of the oppressed; black ecologies; Black Anthropocenes; postindustrial and deindustrialising regions in Central Europe; Marta Knopik’s trilogy
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Blue and Red Make Black. Re-Membering Black Ecologies as Patchy Ecologies
Mateusz Chaberski
citationMateusz Chaberski, ”Blue and Red Make Black”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2985The article revisits the dominant discourse of Black ecologies (Roane and Hosbey), a transdisciplinary field of study that analyses intricate historical and contemporary relationships between the systemic colonial violence towards Black bodies and the escalating eco-ecocrisis. Whereas Black ecologies focus on colonial eco-social projects that affect one subaltern group, drawing on the work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, the article argues that Black ecologies are always patchy ecologies: mosaics of unexpected and often contingent encounters between different, seemingly distant, ecological phenomena and marginalized bodies living in the wake of European colonialism. To substantiate the concept of patchy ecologies, the article analyses performative projects that mobilize the colorants of colonial provenance, predominantly indigo and cochineal, that have been historically used to obtain the Burgundian black, from Late Medieval to the Early Modern period regarded by the European higher classes as the highest-quality black to wear. The projects are interpreted as embodied practices of re-membering (Barad) that constantly re-configure the past in order to posit new, more sustainable futures. First of all, the project Burgundian Black Collaboratory (2019) by the Dutch textile artist and designer Claudy Jongstra is analyzed as it reworks historical dying recipes as an alternative to contemporary ecologically detrimental synthetic dyes. Secondly, the ongoing project Electric Dub Station (2020 – ) by the Panamanian-Dutch artist Jose Antonio Guzman and Serbian textile designer Ana Jankovic is scrutinized as it mobilizes indigo and foregrounds deep interconnections between the Burgundian black and Black suffering under the Atlantic slave trade. Finally, the article looks closely at the installation The System for a Stain (2016) by the American-Chinese artist Candice Lin which demonstrates that the Burgundian black is also intertwined with the story of Indigenous peoples of Mexico.
keywords: Black ecologies; the patchy Anthropocene; patchy ecologies; Burgundian black
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Real Darkness, Grim Visions of the Future, and “Ethical Gloom”: Spaces, Effects, and Visualizations of Deep-Sea Extractivism
Maria Wodzińska
citationMaria Wodzińska, ”Real Darkness, Grim Visions of the Future, and “Ethical Gloom"”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2972The aim of this text is to address the topic of deep-sea mining, or the extraction of raw materials from beneath the ocean floor, one of the most radical and least known mining practices used in the current phase of capitalism, often referred to as extractivism. This practice is used to extract rare elements and rare-earth elements at great depths, in total darkness, making it difficult if not impossible to analyse the extraction methods and the ecological effects that deep-sea mining can cause. The impossibility of empirical investigation of the scale and consequences of this practice triggers various catastrophic visions and fosters black scenarios of the future, and at the same hinders factual data analysis. The involvement of states and corporations in this practice prompts questions about the ethical dimension of underwater extractivism. Discourse that justifies the need to conquer new areas in order to prevent climate catastrophe through the development of green technologies is ‘the ethical gloom’ that shrouds this practice.
keywords: extractivism; ocean; deep-sea-mining
Panorama
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The Colours of a Destroyed Land: Visualizations of the Heaps of the Upper Silesian Coal Basin in Films of the Communist Period as a Cognitive Archive of Environmental Memory
Paweł Tomczok
citationPaweł Tomczok, ”The colours of a destroyed land”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.3003The article presents research on the use of mines and metallurgical heaps as the background of selected Polish post-war films. The first two parts of the Silesian trilogy by Kazimierz Kutz, the novella Dog from the film Krzyż Walecznych, as well as The End of the Holidays and Green Years directed by Stanisław Jędryka, were analyzed. Selected frames and scenes were set in the context of industrial and environmental history and the political and social disputes of the 20th century. This allowed us to recognize the importance of presenting different colours of the broken earth for reflection on the environment in the industrial landscape. The films recorded many objects, both heaps and industrial buildings, which were soon destroyed or significantly changed. Analyzing and reflecting on these photos allows us to create a cognitive archive that will enable to capture ways of looking at multi-colored heaps and being in them, a being in which social security is combined with today's awareness of the contamination of these places.
keywords: Upper Silesia; Kazimierz Kutz; Stanisław Jędryka; environmental history
Snapshots
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Echoes of Familiar Histories
Aleksandra Ross
citationAleksandra Ross, ”Echoes of Familiar Histories”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2983A critical reading of a book “Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene. The New Nature” (Stanford University Press, 2024).
keywords: Anthropocene; map; guide; feral; infrastructure; colonialism; patches
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What Do We Do in the Dark
Tymon Adamczewski
citationTymon Adamczewski , ”What do we do in the dark”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2990This article constitutes a review of the Polish edition of Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology. It summarises the main tenets of the philosopher’s intellectual propositions, including agrologistics or thinking “without Nature”, by placing these ideas in relation to other concepts proposed by the author, e.g. hyperobjects. The review discusses Morton’s reading of the Anthropocene’s farming origins and his meandering way of writing. Although his discursive practices might be demanding on the reader (and can easily induce frustration), such type of performative writing may be seen as an intriguing proposition of interdisciplinary critical discourse in the age of climate catastrophe.
keywords: anthropocene; ecocriticism; agrologistics; hyperobjects; entanglement
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Degrowth. Convincing the Unimaginable, or Survival
Michał Pałasz
citationMichał Pałasz, ”Degrowth. Convincing the Unimaginable, or Survival”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 40 (2024), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.40.2988Critical review of Ewa Bińczyk’s book Socializing the Anthropocene. Ecoverve and Ecologizing the Economy (2024).
keywords: degrowth; ecological economics; Anthropocene; climate crisis; capitalism