Salomé Lopes Coelho at Goldsmiths

On 11 June, Salomé Lopes Coelho delivered a talk at the Goldsmiths Centre of Visual Anthropology Public Programme. Taking baldios (common lands in northern Portugal) as a figure, Salomé explored how moving image practices, from collaborative documentaries to video installation and investigative films, render extractivism as ecological violence and intersect with longer histories of dispossession and harm. Salomé introduced what she tentatively calls “imagens baldias”, or baldio images: a mode of image-making embedded in fieldwork practices that produces visual traces as part of the research process without orienting them toward an expected and cultivated use. Through the framework of ecologies of violence, Salomé discussed how moving images intervene in the violence they address, articulating possible post-extractivist world configurations.