EXTRACTIVISM AS AESTHETICS
The BNCL is proud to present: PROF. ERAY CAYLI, GEOGRAPHY, UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG
Wednesday, 12.6.2024. Rotunde Cartesium, 18:15-20:00.
For additional information or hybrid options please email yichunprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de
Since colonialism’s outset as a modern political project, images have
been central to extractivism, a racial practice that reduces parts of
the Earth and its inhabitants to exploitable and marketable resources.
How does this centrality operate in a context where visual culture
itself has become an extractive industry with images as its raw
material, many of them documenting extractivist violence? The question
is nowhere more salient today than in Turkey’s Kurdistan where both
conventional resource extraction and the extractive industrialization
of visual culture have continued apace and loomed large during the
rapid shift in 2015-16 from peace talks to all-out war. In this talk
(and his forthcoming book of the same title), Eray Çaylı discusses
visual culture’s role in waging, making sense of, and contesting
environmental violence. Informed by collaboration-driven research, he
analyses images produced and circulated across contemporary art,
photojournalism, and social media, charting the visual ecologies
involved in this production and circulation.
ERAY ÇAYLı, PhD (University College London, 2015), is Professor of
Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the
Anthropocene at University of Hamburg. His work interweaves geography,
anthropology, and material/visual culture. At University of Hamburg,
he teaches on topics he previously taught for more than a decade at UK
universities such as UCL and LSE: urban histories and theories of
disaster and conflict, violence’s visualities, and material and
embodied politics of racism and racialization. His ongoing research
explores the ways histories of political violence bear upon discourses
and practices of climate change mitigation, disaster preparedness and
environmental resilience in Turkey and Kurdistan, and their environs
and diasporas.
His publications include the monograph /Victims of
Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past
in Turkey/[1] and the anthology /Architectures of Emergency in Turkey:
Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe/[2]. He is one of the editors
of the /Journal of Visual Culture/[3].
