Ifor Duncan gives invited talk at Kontekst Collective

Our Postdoc Ifor Duncan will give an invited talk titled “The Causal River: Submerged Audio-Visual Practice for Devastated Ecologies” as part of the Volatile worlds: Image, Ecology, Extractivism series organized by Alice Cazenave and Lee Douglas on June 23, 2026; 5-7pm at Helm Studios, 3 Borwick St, Deptford, London SE8 3GH

Drawing on an audio-visual research practice relating to cases of ecological violence including river borders, mega dams, and as infrastructures of genocide, “The Causal River” examines how the contestation of a river’s physical characteristics reveal it as simultaneously a technology of erasure and a processual archive of political violence. Problematising linear models of causality, Forensic Architecture use “field causality” as a relational and spatial concept that enables the investigation of violence through “arrangement[s] of simultaneous sites, actions, and causes”. In response to these questions regarding how a river acts as a site of evidence, underwater forensic experts in Colombia described rivers as unique spaces to sense the trans-temporal traces of human and multi-species violence. Sedimentary materials originating from multiple locations coalesce in sediment at certain points in a river’s course where water slows and eddies. In this presentation Ifor asks what happens when we submerge the causal field? Thinking through the material processes of rivers, he reads against their linear spatio-temporal conception to understand relations of causality as thickening and attenuated through material, social, cultural, and political interlappings.

Register to attend: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/volatile-worlds-image-ecology-extraction-with-ifor-duncan-tickets-1989369930013?aff=oddtdtcreator