Volatile Worlds: Image, Ecology, Extraction

Join us for the CVA Public Programme with Salomé Lopes Coelho to discuss extractive violence and moving image practices in northern Portugal.

Uncultivated Lands, Peoples, Images: Extractive Violence and Moving Image Practices
Speaker: Dr. Salomé Lopes Coelho (University of Utrecht, EcoViolence)
Discussant & Moderator: Lee Douglas

Baldio, a term said of land that has not been cultivated or used and is figuratively read as worthless or vain, names common lands and waters that have been managed and cared for collectively at least since the Middle Ages. In Covas do Barroso, northern Portugal, the baldios are governed through local assemblies and sustained by shared practices of animal grazing, forestry, and wood gathering. A prospective open-pit lithium mining project in the region, framed as strategic to European energy-transition agendas, would be situated largely on these lands. Local resistance, active since 2017, is discursively framed as an impediment to a “green future,” rendering the inhabitants themselves as backward and uncultivated. “Green extractivism” enacts a seizure logic that recodes communal ecologies and livelihoods as underused resources awaiting productive activation; uncultivated lands and uncultivated peoples are thus co-constituted as obstacles to be overcome. This logic reactivates longer genealogies of internal colonisation under the Estado Novo, imperial expansionist desires, and ecological violence.

Taking baldios as a figure, our speaker will explore 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. She will introduce what she tentatively call "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 – circulation and exhibition. Through the framework of ecologies of violence, we will discuss how moving images intervene in the violence they address, articulating possible post-extractivist world configurations.

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The CVA Public Programme "Volatile Worlds" together artists, researchers, and practitioners whose work engages image-making as a materially embedded and environmentally entangled practice. Rather than approaching images solely as visual representations, we will attend to their conditions of possibility: the substances, labour, and ecologies that sustain them, and the forms of violence they both register and reproduce.

CVA is a research and teaching platform dedicated to advancing innovation in visual and multimodal anthropology, supporting a network of practitioners whose work expands ethnographic theory and form beyond text. The programme is co-sponsored by the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths and KONTEKST Collective, whose 2026 Film Festival Entanglements shares related concerns.

Convened by Alice Cazenave & Lee Douglas.

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