Attuning to the whisperings: Cinematic epistemologies from within environmental crises
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Abstract
What might be decolonial strategies of acting on the causes, histories, and effects of environmental crises?
Aiming at a complex understanding of situated issues pivoting around environmental crises—as experienced, made sense of, and acted upon by those who are affected by it —this writing centers cinematic epistemologies from Indonesia in the study of environmental crises mitigation practices. The intellectual territory and foundational assumptions of mainstream environmental discourse and visuality fail to acknowledge persisting roots in the colonial, capitalist and patriarchal logic of modernity enabled by epistemicide. I will propose to turn the gaze to cinematic epistemologies—as multi-species assemblages—bearing transformative potential for cultivating the grounds for care as a process of relating, for a different way of becoming attuned to the world. Their inherent micro-political potential lies not in putting forward alternative knowledges, but in alternative (intuitive, experimental, affective) conventions of knowledge production and dissemination.
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