Dr Ifor Duncan

Staff details

Position Lecturer in Research Architecture
Department Visual Cultures
Email i.duncan (@gold.ac.uk)
Dr Ifor Duncan

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.

Publications and research outputs

Article

Duncan, Ifor. 2023. Fugitive Rivers: Maroon Ecologies and Édouard Glissant’s La Lézarde. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, ISSN 1468-8417

Duncan, Ifor. 2023. Necro-Hydrology. e-flux Architecture,

Duncan, Ifor. 2021. The Meteorological Occult: Submergences in the Venetian Fog. Lagoonscapes. The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, 1(1), pp. 37-58. ISSN 2785-2709

Duncan, Ifor and Levidis, Stefanos. 2020. Weaponizing a River. e-flux Architecture,

Book Section

Duncan, Ifor. 2022. Drought in the Rivers of Forgetting. In: Benek Cincik and Tiago Torres-Campos, eds. Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation. Barcelona: dpr-barcelona, pp. 140-147. ISBN 9788494938870

Duncan, Ifor and Levidis, Stefanos. 2022. 'Arcifinious'. In: José Roca and Juan Francisco Salazar, eds. Rīvus: A Glossary of Water. Sydney, Australia: Biennale of Sydney Ltd 2022, pp. 47-48. ISBN 9780958040327

Duncan, Ifor. 2019. Undercurrents: Submergence and the Hidroituango Megadam. In: Lindsay Bremner, ed. Monsoon [+ other] Waters. London: A Monsoon Assemblages Publication, pp. 19-27. ISBN 9780992965709

Edited Journal

Duncan, Ifor and Vallerani, Francesco, eds. 2023. Coastal Waterways, Cultural Heritage and Environmental Planning, Shima, 17(2). 1834-6057

Film/Video

Duncan, Ifor. 2021. Il Naufragio Inizia Da Qui (The Shipwreck Starts Here).

Further profile content

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