Elke Marhöfer

Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass)

Bloomsbury, [forthcoming]

The two concepts of extinction and becoming are difficult to think together, both are more than just a metaphor and none of them offers an easy way out. Tossing more species to the margins increasingly faster, extinction highlights the extraordinary level of disturbance and precarity that the bonding of science and capitalism has imposed on our and other species. Most creatures and places of the earth have been measured, consumed, exhausted, infected, eliminated, and otherwise killed. Becoming adds an affective dimension to our relation with the environment and helps to grasp the disappearance of species, not only as destructive and final, but as transitory. Becoming-with-the-dead mobilizes our imagination for a future life without reconciliation or a place to hide. [continue reading]

Julia Bee

Filming through the Milieu.
Becoming Extinct and the Anthropocene

New York: Routledge, 2020

The concept of the Anthropocene has been widely discussed from different perspectives beyond the scope of geology. Feminism and postcolonial theory have critiqued it as a new master narration and specifically the notion of the human as a problematic signifier of a very limited group of people having enduring impact on the planet’s atmosphere as well as on geology. In opposition to the concept of the Anthropocene, Donna Haraway has proposed the “Chtulhucene” (2015; 2016) as an age centered on relations instead of re-affirming the (destructive) agency of the human by making it a geological force. [continue reading]

Thanks to Elena Chizhikova, Irina Shilova, Laura Horelli, Matei Bellu, Mikhail Lylov, and Valentina Lylova, the dogs Dick, Belka and Jasmin, and the horse Carmen.

Additional support by Divnogorje Natural Museum Reserve, Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, University of Gothenburg, Academin Valand

For public or institutional screenings, please contact Arsenal Distribution Berlin