Dr Ifor Duncan
Staff details
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Ifor Duncan is a writer, artist and inter-disciplinary researcher with a specific focus on the overlaps of political violence with degrading watery spaces, processes, and materialities. He encounters these concerns through visual cultures, cultural memory, and a fieldwork practice that involves submerged audio-visual storytelling methods.
Ifor completed his PhD entitled Hydrology of the Powerless at the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA), Goldsmiths, which addressed the ways hydrologic properties (flows, mud, rain, fog ...) are instrumentalised through border regimes, as technologies of obfuscation, and weaponised against marginalised communities.
He was postdoctoral fellow in the Environmental Humanities at the New Institute Centre for the Environmental Humanities (NICHE), Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice (2020-22), and has been a visiting lecturer in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art.
Academic qualifications
- PhD Research Architecture (Goldsmiths, University of London) 2021
- MA Cultural Theory (University College London) 2013
- BA English Literature and History (University of Leeds) 2010
Research interests
Research areas: Environmental humanities and watery humanities, visual cultures, spatial practices, postcolonial and decolonial theory, border studies, memory theory, practice-led research.
Further profile content
Featured publications
2020: Ifor Duncan & Stefanos Levidis, ‘Weaponizing a River,’ E-Flux Architecture (2020)
2021:
Ifor Duncan, Il Naufragio Inizia da Qui / The Shipwreck Starts Here
Film screened at SAVVY contemporary (Berlin), Cinema Galleggiante (Venice), Cloud Sediments Ambika P3 (London) and elsewhere.
Ifor Duncan, ‘Drought in the Rivers of Forgetting,’ in Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the
Geopolitics of Representation, Benek Cincik and Tiago Torres-Campos eds. (Barcelona: DPR-Barcelona, 2022).
Ifor Duncan, ‘The Meteorological Occult: Submergences in the Venetian fog’, in Venice Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2021, vol.1:1, pp. 37-5
Conferences and talks
2022:
‘Weaponizing a River’
Media Lecture with Stefanos Levidis at Rīvus Biennale of Sydney
2022:
‘Hydrology of the Powerless (Weaponizing a River)’
Media Lecture at Confluence, CCA Glasgow
2022:
‘Weaponizing a River’
Media Lecture at Rivers and Borders, in collaboration with the exhibition Al río / To the River by Zoe Leonard, MUDAM Museum (The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg)
2022:
‘Precipitations’
Convened Chapter 1 of the Lecture Series Waterscapes at NICHE Ca’ Foscari with Sarah Nuttall and Melody Jue.
2019:
‘Venice is Leaking’
Co-Convened seminar at Anthropocene Campus Venice: Water Politics in the Age of the Anthropocene
