Event overview
Join us for the CVA Public Programme with artist-researcher Ifor Duncan to discuss forensic underwater image-making as a response to eco-political violence in Colombia.
"The Causal River: Submerged Audio-Visual Practice for Devastated Ecologies"
With Dr. Ifor Duncan (University of Utrecht, EcoViolence)
Discussant: Professor Susan Schuppli
Moderator: Lee Douglas
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 my 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 I ask what happens when we submerge the causal field? Thinking through the material processes of rivers, I read against their linear spatio-temporal conception to understand relations of causality as thickening and attenuated through material, social, cultural, and political interlappings.
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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 Dr Alice Cazenave & Dr Lee Douglas.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Jun 2026 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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