Iluminace, 2023 (vol. 35), issue 2
(Eco)Traumatic Landscapes in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture
Editorial
(Eco)Traumatic Landscapes in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture
Bori Máté
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):5-8 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1764 
Special Issue Editorial
Theme Articles
Traumatic Landscapes from Above: Images of Colonization and Violence in the Sea of Plastic
Miguel Fernández Labayen, Loreto García Saiz
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):9-30 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1755
The so-called “Sea of Plastic” in Almeria (southern Spain) is the largest concentration of plastic greenhouses in the world. Because of its monumentalism and “accidental aesthetics” (Davis, 2015), this geographic region has been extensively depicted from above by aircrafts, satellites, and drones from the 1950s to the present. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, it offers a historical account of these images from above (from the ones obtained during the Francoist period for geopolitical purposes to those taken by local farmers today) in order to understand its colonial condition and legacy; second, it explores the...
The Rhythms of More-than-human Matter in Azucena Losana’s Eco-developed Film Series Metarretratos
Salomé Lopes Coelho
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):31-49 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1758
This essay explores the eco-developing project Metarretratos by Mexican filmmaker Azucena Losana, addressing it in the context of a set of cinematic gestures concerned with the environmental impact of film. Focusing particularly on the film Ceibo/Erythrina crista-galli, the article argues that the series contributes to the three main axes that characterize academic debates about film and environmental concerns: a) with regard to cinematographic modes of production, b) concerning the thematization of the more-than-human and its relationships with humans and the environment, and c) with reference to the understanding of images as matter...
Becoming-Grains of Mercury: Documentary Ecologies, Posthumanism, and the Entanglements of Traumas
Erica Biolchini
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):51-71 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1759
Félix Guattari, in his ecosophical work The Three Ecologies, urges us to contemplate and, most importantly, to live transversally with the entangled ecologies of nature and culture/society. Specifically, he states that “it is simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate;” particularly, he adds, when it comes to the “simultaneous degradation of the three areas.” Guattari’s transversal process is more accurate than ever if we consider how human activity, in the context of the current geological epoch — the Anthropocene — has sent the Earth’s natural ecosystems...
Diffractive Way of Thinking and the Possibilities of Capturing Ecological Trauma in Tomonari Nishikawa’s sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014)
Bori Máté
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):73-94 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1761
sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014) is a camera-less two-minute-long film directed by the Japanese experimental filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa. He buried a 100-foot-long 35mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road close to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station where it was exposed to the possible remains of radioactive materials. The film is a document of an intrusive past. It becomes an (eco) traumatic landscape and a local manifestation of a hyperobject called radiation. This article will employ the concept of diffraction as a new materialist concept whose qualities are quite underexplored in...
‘Traumatomic’ Encounters. Trauma through Radioactivity in Photofilmic ’Experimental Documents’ of Chernobyl
Beja Margitházi
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):95-112 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1760
Nuclear trauma has always resisted verbal and visual portrayal, calling for various alternative, form-breaking methods. This article discusses three artistic works which I consider “experimental documents” because of their various photographic and filmic practices of intimately approaching the radioactive contamination still present in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The site-related projects of Alice Miceli (Chernobyl Project, 2006–2010), Lina Selander (Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut, 2011), and Daniel McIntyre (Lion series, 2011–2014) go beyond the journalistic representations of the...
Reviews
Oldřich Nový Never Actually Left
Valerie Coufalová
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):113-118 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1763
Review of Šárka Gmiterková's monograph: ON: Kristian v montérkách (Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2022).
Journeys to the Journey to the Beginning of Time
Jakub Egermajer
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):119-124 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1762
Review of the collective volume Lukáš Skupa (ed.): Cesta do pravěku. Dobrodružná věda (Academia – Casablanca, 2023).