“Volatile worlds: Image, Ecology, Extractivism” brings together artists, researchers, and practitioners whose work engages image-making as a materially embedded and environmentally entangled practice. Across film, photography, and experimental media, the programme foregrounds how images are produced through extractive infrastructures—petrochemical industries, mineral processes, agricultural transformations, and Settler-colonial land regimes. Rather than approaching images solely as visual representations, "Volatile Worlds" attends to their conditions of possibility: the substances, labour, and ecologies that sustain them, and the forms of violence they both register and reproduce. Here, the material residues of diverse media point to the ethical and political challenges of studying forms of violence in the anthropocene.
NOTE!
In solidarity with staff currently locked out of the Goldsmiths, KONTEKST Collective is taking over the CVA Public Programme, which will now be held off campus grounds. See below for updated venues. More updates to come!
From 5-7pm on the following days:
2 June // Edd Carr and Hannah Fletcher (Sustainable Darkroom) - Helm Studios, 3 Borwick St, Deptford SE8 3GH
3 June // Sam Nightingale (RCA & Ruhr-Universität Bochum) - Helm Studios, 3 Borwick St, Deptford SE8 3GH
11 June // Salomé Lopes Coelho (EcoViolence, Utrecht) - TBC
23 June // Ifor Duncan (EcoViolence, Utrecht) - TBC
The works presented explore image-making as a site of inquiry into ecological crisis and its histories, from the chemical toxicity of photographic processes to the reshaping of landscapes through mining, salinisation, and industrial agriculture. Many of the practices featured move beyond representational modes, engaging directly with materials and environments through experimental, process-based, and site-responsive methods. Particular attention is given to how visual practices intervene in and reconfigure extractive relations—tracing their colonial genealogies, making perceptible their ongoing effects, and opening space for alternative ways of sensing and relating to damaged environments.