Salomé Lopes Coelho presents at International Symposium ‘media/environment. Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis’

This presentation examines how collaborative and experimental documentaries, as well as investigative and science communication films and video installations addressing an ongoing lithium extraction conflict in Covas do Barroso construct the memory of ecological violence. By reworking environmental data, collaborative filmmaking, and assembling testimonial and embodied perspectives, these films reinforce and/or resist extraction framed as inevitable within a so-called green transition and challenge its temporal and spatial abstractions. I trace how cinematic figurations of green extractivist violence mobilise templates from other histories of violence and film history itself, to make intelligible its logics, infrastructures, temporalities, and affective dimensions. Drawing on the framework of ecologies of violence and on film analysis, archival sources, interviews, and fieldwork practices, I ask: How do non-fiction films render extractivism perceptible as violence, shaping how extraction is understood, reinforced, or contested? How do they intervene in the violence they depict, from conditions of production to screening practices, and articulate possible post-extractivist world configurations? Through their formal affordances, non-fiction films emerge as sites of environmental memory, configuring and reconfiguring how extraction is imagined, made legible, and contested.