The term Anthropocene has been critiqued for failing to adequately acknowledge the disproportionate influence of fossil fuel capitalism and imperialism on the ongoing environmental crisis and how its effects are unevenly experienced across the Global South and North. Alternative conceptual frameworks—the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene and the Plantationocene—that seek to address these inequalities have been offered.[1] This paper will focus on one of these terms: the Capitalocene and will consider its usefulness for developing a critical vocabulary to describe and theorise recent films and video works from Southeast Asia that address themes of infrastructural development and both colonial and contemporary processes of resource extractivism. In doing so, I follow T.J. Demos’s conceptualisation of “the extractivist logic of the Capitalocene.”[2]
The paper will discuss this concept in relation to the work of three filmmakers and artists from Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia that similarly draw attention to the ways that present day environmental concerns are intertwined with historical legacies of colonial expansionism across the region: Sutthirat Supaparinya’s “electricity generation series” (2012—); Nguyen Phuong Linh’s Memories of a Blind Elephant (2014-16) and Danech San’s A Million Years (2018).
Referencing local cosmologies and belief systems, these works also reveal an openness to pre-colonial temporalities and even deep time. The paper will consider how through these connections, these works from Southeast Asia draw attention to the asymmetrical power relations that result from the loss of Indigenous land rights and cultures, and the exploitation of the natural environment for capitalist purposes across the region.
This research forms part of a co-authored book and website project with Dr Jasmine Nadua Trice on film and media organising in Southeast Asia, please see: https://www.aseac-interviews.org for more information.
Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her research focusses on artists’ moving image, eco-cinema, sound, and Southeast Asian independent cinema. She is currently writing a book on the politics of sound and listening in global artists’ film and is also working on an oral history project with Jasmine Nadua Trice, entitled: “Parallel Practices: Oral Histories of Southeast Asian Film and Video Cultures, 1997-2022.” She has recently edited two dossiers for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (“Theorizing Region: Film and Video Cultures in Southeast Asian Cinema” co-edited with Jasmine Nadua Trice) and Screen (“Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Cinemas” co-edited with Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn) which are both forthcoming in 2021. She has previously published her research in Screen; Sound, Music and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack and Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.
Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))
Panel 5: Politics and Poetics of Nature
7:30-9pm HK/SG / 12:30-2pm BST / 1:30-3pm CEST / 7:30-9am EDT / 4:30-6am PDT
[1] See Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 162.
[2] T.J. Demos, ‘Blackout: The Necropolitics of Extraction’, Dispatches, Issue 1, October 1, 2018, http://dispatchesjournal.org/articles/blackout-the-necropolitics-of-extraction/