Salomé Lopes Coelho presenting at GERMINATIONS

On 5 February, Salomé Lopes Coelho is presenting at GERMINATIONS: Conversations in Environmental Humanities with Latin America & the Caribbean, an event organized by the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS). The title of her presentation is ‘Ecological Violence and Documentary Cinema: Lithium Mining Conflicts from Covas do Barroso to the Andean Puna’.

The presentation examines documentary practices addressing lithium extraction conflicts in Covas do Barroso and the Andean Puna, focusing on how cinema constructs the memory of mining as ecological violence. It traces intersections through three figures—dilemma, commons, and backwardness—attending to histories of resistance, dispossession, and lifeways in each context. The films under discussion include science communication works alongside collaborative and experimental documentaries, ranging from institutional productions that support extractivist expansion to community-based projects that foreground local knowledge and contest mining projects, within the framework of the so-called green transition. These works render mining thinkable, legitimate, or contested, materialising the entanglements of ecological degradation with other histories of violence, including colonialism. Cinema thus functions as a site of memory of ecoviolence, enacting relational and embodied spaces where environmental harm, resistance, and accountability are registered and disputed, reshaping transnational imaginaries of extraction.

Chairs: Gianfranco Selgas (Stockholm University), Jamille Pinheiro Dias(ILCS/SAS), Paul Merchant (University of Bristol).

Visit the website of the organizer to register for this free online event. The event will start at 16:00 GMT (UK time), 17:00 CET.