Against Imperial Extinction Narratives Wildlife, (In)visibility and Temporality in the Moving Image

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the representation of species extinction and endangerment as mediated through artists’ moving image. It departs from a critique of the anthropocentric gaze, looking and the imperial origins of the camera as dominant in visual animal representations such as the wildlife genre. Consequently, this thesis examines how visual animal representations shape and cement unequal and hierarchical human-wildlife relations of violence, surveillance and control, both materially and visually. It then analyses its corpus, consisting of Carlos Casas’s experimental film Cemetery (2019), Fiona Tan’s film installation Depot (2015) and Kerstin Honeit’s film installation Panda Moonwalk or Why Meng Meng Walks Backwards (2018), to argue that these artworks envision a new gaze on wildlife through a focus on framing, (in)visibility and temporality, subverting the objectifying and surveilling anthropocentric gaze. Crucially, this thesis argues that any examination of extinction needs to centralize the colonial and imperial histories of capitalism as long-standing structures that are enabled by and persist on wildlife extraction and destruction. This thesis aims to show the breadth and long-term consequences of these structures in relation to extinction, human-animal relations and visual imaginaries. It aims to do so by engaging with Western imperial institutions of animal display – specifically the rainforest, the natural history museum and the zoo – and conceptualizes these sites as heterotopias of wildlife. Although structural forces of animal extinction are rare in visual representations, the analysis of these artworks demonstrate ways in which this is possible. Revealing the shared characteristic of temporality in extinction and the moving image, this thesis enables a critical examination of the imperial ideology of linear temporality and excavate ways in which both extinction and the moving image can propose heterogeneous temporalities instead. This is opposed to tendencies in extinction studies and discourse that focus on producing environmental affect through species fetishization and commodification, emphasis on individual responsibility or the generalized ‘Anthropocene’, and passive narratives of grief and mourning. This thesis analyses its corpus as evocation of this central argument and approach, proposed as ‘radical extinction studies’