Ifor Duncan gives invited talk at Kontekst Collective

Our Postdoc Ifor Duncan gave a lecture 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. At a well attended event on a swelteringly hot June 23rd in London Ifor drew on his audio-visual research practice to address 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. 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.

The talk was followed by a discussion with Professor Susan Schuppli and Lee Douglas.