Survival on the shores of a sacrifice zone: Thinking ecological emergencies together

Abstract

How to address and cope with the complexity of the ecological breakdown as a documentary moving image artist? This text contends that the causes and the consequences of the current ecological situation create some challenges for documentary-orientated artistic practices. These challenges are on the one hand related to the overwhelming complexity of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, as addressed in this text, these challenges are connected to dominant assumptions related to the label ‘documentary’. By revisiting the roots of the documentary this article examines how the documentary mode can be productive for the planet’s present and future challenges. This endeavour will be illustrated by the way Belgian artists Hannes Dereere and Silke Huysmans use and present documentary footage in their documentary-performance Pleasant Island. Their thoughtful use of today’s most omnipresent device, the smartphone, problematizes the traditional responses of the documentary mode on climate emergency, whilst at the same time, their use of moving images and the instrument that produced these images insists to think today’s emergencies together.