Conference Program

Lebanon’s collective recovery from decades of civil war and post-civil war violence continues to be hampered by multiple political, economic, and environmental crises brought about by successive governments each driving the country from the depth of one crisis into the edge of another. Against a backdrop of public disillusionment with the political elite, practices of cultural and artistic resistance in Lebanon conceive of the Beirut Port explosion as not only a scarring example of the state’s negligence, but also as an inevitable culmination of a sequence of crises which preceded it.

This paper examines the work of a number of multidisciplinary Lebanese artists who communicate diverse approaches to the blast and its aftermath. Ali Charri’s disfigured sculptures capture the multiple injuries caused by the blast; Abed al-Kadiri’s charcoal canvases invite his audience to undo the destruction using an eraser; Tania el-Khoury’s installation ‘They Knew’ raises questions around accountability; and finally, Pierre Koukjian’s neon recreations evoke everyday spoken Arabic in order to point to Lebanon’s collapsing infrastructure. Together, these varied approaches mediate public resistance, constitute sites of collective grief, and raise a number of questions, particularly around the actors in whom power resides, the mechanisms which allow the emergence and organization of public agency, and the entangled practices of those who enact authority. While these questions guide my analysis of the Beirut Port explosion, they also have a significant cultural and socio-political resonance for present-day Lebanon more broadly.

There is a long-standing struggle for justice by communities in the Niger Delta against the multiple ‘injuries’ wrought by the oil resource extraction industry. Some communities and individuals have turned to national and international jurisdictions to seek some sort of redress through available legal avenues. There is however a disjuncture between how people organise and live in relationality to territory, and the legally legible demarcations of village, local government, federal state, national and international borders. This paper explores the role that art, activism and visual methodologies can play in mapping the territory of ‘injuries’ that impact people, environments, livelihoods and their ways of seeing and being in the world. It argues that much can be gained from examining the longue durée of accommodation and activism through a multiplicity of art practices (visual, poetry, sound) in the Niger Delta. It further explores the opportunities and challenges of linking these embodied and lived relational interventions that map the territory of ‘injury’ with civil society and international digital mapping initiatives in the region. This can potentially give greater visibility to the intersections of injustice and resistance that currently struggle for legibility, to better capture people’s deep lived experiences and right of custodianship over their environments

In a context of strong dehumanisation and disempowerment of populations across the Global South, the paper presents the methodology I as a curator put in place to give voice to 22 pluri-disciplinary artistic propositions in public spaces in the city of Douala, Cameroon. I was asked by the first African Art Center of the continent, doual'art, to curate the 4th edition of their SUD2017 biennale in the city, with public works of art that could artistically interpret the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We commissioned 16 international contemporary artists, including 11 from the African continent, around the following themes: 1) questioning the UDHR, its framing and implementation; 2) the place of history in considering ‘humanity’; and 3) the ‘human and the urban’, focusing on relations with the environment. Finally, we dedicated this biennale to giving voice to the youth- through their stories and their public speaking, bringing back utopia and dreams in the public space.

This presentation will be illustrated by a short documentary presenting the process and the making of the SUD2017.

In the face of rapidly accelerating climate emergency, whose reach may be global but whose immediate impacts are already worst affecting populations in the Global South, the transition to renewable energies has never been more pressing. One of the countries at the forefront of these efforts is Colombia, whose president Gustavo Petro has made phasing out fossil fuels a flagship policy. In this transition away from fossil fuels, Petro has identified La Guajira as a crucial region for the generation of wind energy. While renewable energies have a fundamental part to play in de-carbonisation, a growing body of literature warns of the harms of ‘green extractivism,’ whereby renewable energy projects hailed as the solution to climate crisis continue to enact modes of extractivism, dispossession and displacement. In a powerful demonstration of the effects of green extractivism, in 2023 the NGO Nación Wayuu (Wayuu Nation) released the documentary Vientos de Sangre (Winds of Blood), which charts the harmful impacts of wind energy projects on indigenous Wayuu communities in La Guajira. Inspired by Iheka’s (2021) approach to interpreting environmental media that locates media forms in both local and global contexts, this paper analyses Vientos de Sangre as a form of visual activism that illuminates the specific injuries inflicted on Wayuu communities by wind projects, at the same time as challenging the wider ‘aesthetics of green dispossession’ (Ulloa 2023) and transnational discourses that uncritically embrace renewable energies.