COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHIES AND THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’
An event in partnership with Pushkin House
PROGRAMME
Counter-cartographies and the ‘war on terror’ Stephen Graham
Like all programmes of political violence, the so-called ‘war on terror’ that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks relied on a Manichean separation of two worlds: the sanctified, vulnerable, ‘homeland’ – ‘us’ – and the demonised enmity of the targeted peripheries deemed to be places where terrorism was nurtured and launched. State and media-led cartography worked to cement and essentialise this binary separation. This talk will explore how a range of activists, artists and scholars worked to use techniques of counter-cartography, as well as other visual methods, to challenge this binary separation – and the violence it supported. The talk will explore examples of a range of strategies involved: exposure, juxtaposition, appropriation, jamming, satire collaboration.
Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University. His work addresses the politics of urban security and the growing vertical reach of cities. His 2011 book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism was nominated for the Orwell Prize in political writing and was a Guardian’s book of the year. His most recent book, Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers, was published by Verso in 2016.
Agata Nguyen Chuong Mapping the Legacies of Colonial Violence
The presentation will feature the latest investigation by Forensic Architecture/Forensis on the German Colonial Genocide of Herero and Nama people in present day Namibia, drawing a connection between colonial war crimes and land grab with the long duration of colonial violence reverberating into the present in the form of widespread environmental degradation. At the initiative of ECCHR, FA undertook a process of collaborative modelling and mapping of key sites in the genocide and other as-yet-unaccounted-for atrocities committed by Germany against the Ovaherero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908.
Across Namibia, monuments honour the perpetrators of genocide, mass graves of victims are unmarked, and sites of atrocity fall into ruin. The majority of the country’s viable land is owned by white descendants of European colonists while Black descendants of genocide victims live in intergenerational poverty. Working with oral historians and using a variety of methods such as geolocation, photomatching, advanced digital modelling and Situated Testimony, the team has mapped places for which no traces remain today – concentration camps, ancestral homesteads, and long gone landscapes. The preliminary result is a new body of digital evidence that can be leveraged by local communities and their legal advocates in support of long-standing demands for land restitution and reparations. Further materials related to the investigation are forthcoming.
Agata Nguyen Chuong is a researcher at Forensic Architecture. Her work has engaged with themes of environmental violence and land dispossession through geospatial analysis, moving image and worldbuilding.