Visual Anthropology Panel: Beyond Ecocide: Rethinking Narratives of Environmental Harm through Film
This panel brings together two distinct yet resonant works to challenge dominant visual and conceptual frameworks of environmental crisis. Moving beyond all-encompassing discourses, both films attend to subtle, layered, and often overlooked forms of environmental transformation shaped by human and non-human interactions.
Rather than depicting catastrophe as spectacle, these works foreground processes of accumulation, care, extraction, and perception. Layers of Confidence interrogates the politics of visibility and knowledge production, revealing how environmental harm is mediated through institutional and technological lenses. Minding Sand, by contrast, traces granular material flows and embodied engagements with landscapes under pressure, emphasizing temporality, fragility, and situated experience.
Together, the films invite viewers to reconsider how environmental harm is narrated, sensed, and understood. The panel situates these cinematic practices within broader debates in environmental and visual anthropology, asking how film can reframe imaginaries of ecological justice and accountability through storytelling.
Chair: Martha Cecilia-Dietrich (Visual Anthropology University of Amsterdam, NWO consortium JUST ART (JA) – Creating Common Grounds for Climate Justice through Artistic Research)
Filmscreenings plus aftertalk with the directors:
Layers of Confidence by Lou Boshart. 2025, 28 min. Winner 2025 Metje Postma Award for Excellence in Visual & Multimodal Ethnography Thesis, Leiden University.
Minding Sand by Laura van Erp. 2024, 34 min. Winner of the Mario Rutten prize 2024