Animism, Film and the Mangrove: Reading ‘Luta Ca Caba Inda’ through Film as an Animist Medium

Work-in-progress talk by Tom Vickery, Postgraduate Researcher at the University of Leeds and Visiting Researcher at the Art History Institute, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the study of animism in academic institutions has experienced a revitalised vigour. Moving on from its modern framing as a form of religious belief situated early on the linear scale of cognitive development, anthropology, and resultingly art history and film studies, has begun to look at animism relationally. Animism is now more willingly conceived as a condition of consciousness that perceives referential and agentic persons, existing as a mutually compounding field of relation beyond the individual human subject.

This work-in-progress paper will follow these developments to read film, through Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César’s ‘Skola di Tarafe’ (Mangrove School) (2022), as a specifically animist medium. In an essay on animist cinema, César speaks directly to the potential of the medium in understanding animism as a condition of relationality: ‘the animist coding of matter is … a force of existence that operates humanity beyond the body and is, therefore, not colonizable matter, not reachable to the oppressors.’

This paper will unpack César’s interaction with the concept, reading animist film as a distinctly eco-critical framework, uniquely positioned to welcome conviviality with larger-than-human subjectivities and consider alternatives for thinking-with-the-world.

Full details about this talk can be found here.

About the speaker

Tom Vickery is an Amanda Burton and Association of Art History funded PhD researcher at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds. Concentrating on community and relation, Tom’s research surrounds the intersection of coloniality and ecology in the archival arts project ‘Luta Ca Caba Inda’ (The Struggle is Not Over Yet). Having recently completed a period of fieldwork at Mediateca Onshore in Guinea-Bissau, Tom will present a work-in-progress paper on animism and ecology in the filmic work of ‘Luta Ca Caba Inda’.

The talk concludes a month spent by Tom in Lisbon as a Visiting Researcher within the Contemporary Art Studies Research Group of the Art History Institute, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, under the supervision of Ana Balona de Oliveira.

Venue

Room B211 (2nd floor, Tower B)
NOVA FCSH (School of Social Sciences and Humanities)
Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Av. de Berna, 26 C
1069-061 Lisbon

Image

Mangrove, Guinea-Bissau, 2024. Photo: Tom Vickery.