Activist and activist-adjacent films relate to all this variation, and provide meaningful structure to drive other particular ways of being. Radical film can support activist campaigns to stop a mine, end an oil pipeline, or support another way being that are outside of brutal frame of this extractivist madness.
This discussion looks at how we, as activists, sit with the knowledge of our transforming world, and the knowledge of what things need to change, and how. This discussion looks at how we, as film makers, focus our lenses to tell the stories we know should be told so that the pipelines disappear before the water does- in one way by supporting activist campaigns, and differently to support political action, and in another way to support a wider cultural ecology.
This discussion is aware of the wider social ecology of films and stories that are and that must be told so that change has its place and makes its sense. This knowledge ecology is political and it is also social and cultural in that it frames and holds logics for activity. It is habitual because it tends to and develops logic and routines that afford political change, and the people, creatures and plants that contribute to the transformations.
Conversation hosted by Marc Herbst, co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest which is co-published with Pluto Press “We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself” but the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Marc is also a PhD advisor at TransArt Institute.