Titles
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Technologies Evolve: Visualizing Mixed Reality Over Time in ...Temporal Place(s): Transitory Representations of the Landsca...Temporospatial Mediator: Site-specific Theater within Cultur...The Digital Agency, Protest Movements, and Social Activism d...The Dormant Buildings of Imbros: Dami, Photogrammetry and Dr...The Empty Eerie: Exploring the uncanny nature of empty space...The Future of Dwelling: The KitchenThe Future of Object, Approach, and Setting when Curating in...The Image of Territory: Landscape Perception and Infrastruct...The Image, the Imaging and the Imagining of the InteriorThe Incomplete Results of an Act of MappingThe Inter-generational Comparison of Balinese Houses: a Spac...The Intersecting Landscapes of Cinema Production and Exhibit...The Poverty of EmbodimentThe Realities of FragmentsThe Role of Screen Space in Architecture and Film as Multime...The Screen as Surface, Site and SpaceThe Screen, Intimacy, and the Attention Economy: Are We Ever...The Space of VistaVisionThe Substantive Content of Eryri - A Lived Landscape with a ...The Time HouseThe Unrepresented Chicago of 1893The Urban Photographic Portrait: Paradigms and ProjectsThe Visual as Narrative Practice: Using Images to Construct...The Visuality of Urban Digital TwinsTlatelolco Disproved; a participatory mapping of life, in Ma...Tools to Imagine: Digital Methods of Investigating Classical...Towards the Unknown. Projection, Prediction, PotentialityTracing the Familiar: Spatial Research through Essayistic Fi...Undergoing Change: the Potential of a Liminal State for Hosp...Undocumented History: Accessing the Intangible Past Through ...Uniting Space and Time in the Documentation of Urban Setting...Visionary Rumours Lost in Space – between rationale and re...Visualising Storytelling through a Locally Based Digital Way...Visualization and Parametric Design of Sustainable Domes, In...Walk’s Eye: Traversing Diverse Territories with GoPro Came...Welcome and IntroductionWhiteness, Reloaded: Addressing the ghosts in reverse* of th...Who needs film for city symphonies? Edwin Rousby. Showcasing...‘Zoom-Walks’ and Cyanotypes: Materializing Screen Ontoph...“You’ve seen one post-apocalyptic city, you’ve seen th...
Presenters
Schedule

Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Bringing the Body Back into Place: Assessing the Value of Liminality in Stephens and Sprinkle’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain
I. Konik
2:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Abstract

This presentation analyzes how Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013), demonstrates the value of liminality as a transformative space for activism that is aimed at protecting natural places. The film tackles one of the processes of capitalist exploitation of wider nature, namely mountaintop removal for coal mining, in Stephens’s childhood home of West Virginia. While one might expect a traditional, informational, nature documentary approach to such an issue, Stephens and Sprinkle take a different route, arguably owing to the insights that their own liminal situations have afforded them. These queer scholars and activists, who openly identify as ecosexual, document in this film how their own struggle for equal rights for same-sex couples, was transformed into a war against the destruction of nature of which we are a part. In this regard, Stephens and Sprinkle’s weapons of choice became ecosexual weddings, during which they married various natural entities such as forests, mountains, and the Earth, to promote renewed connectedness between themselves and wider nature. That is, within the context of such performance art, Stephens and Sprinkle reconnect with wider nature by bringing their own bodies back into place, as it were, to show how human relationships with Earth’s life can be more intense than previously imagined – to the point of eroticism, and beyond. In this presentation, it is advanced that the cinematic dynamics of Stephens and Sprinkle’s ‘love story’ illustrate the value of liminality, a state between identity and non-identity, for catalyzing pro-environmental change.

Biography

Inge Konik is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. She serves as an associate editor for the journal Environmental Humanities. Inge teaches ecofeminism, continental philosophy, and film theory. Her current research is focused on materialist ecological feminism, and environmental and feminist cinema. Her writing on these topics has appeared in journals such as Environmental Values, Angelaki, Critical Arts, and the South African Journal of Art History.