This week we focused on what it means to be ‘Damaged’.  I sort of have a brainstorm about ‘damage’ under some of the categories in our environment and what is damaged within the landscape. The author describes how two organisms with a symbiotic relationship continue to survive after the landscape is damaged. In the reading, the author calls the symbiotic relationship “Chthulucene”. The author’s understanding of “damaged” is “those now submerged and squashed in the tunnels, caves, remnants, edges, and crevices of damaged waters, airs, and lands.”(Haraway, Donna J. p71) which got me thinking that everything cannot be organized in a certain way because there are a lot of things that humans cannot control, and there are a lot of spontaneous behaviors that humans cannot change either, that’s also the reason why objects have to co-exist in the face of environmental damage.

 As an interpretation of “Damaged”, my work attempts to capture the strange, messy or broken features in my eye to show how the landscape has suffered. The items include manmade damages like bottled water, litter, paint stains on the ground, along with natural interferences as such weed-ravaged plants, wind-damaged obstacles and wind-broken twigs. By editing, a comparison has been drawn between the two.

 Despite the publicity to protect the environment, people are still unconsciously throw away rubbish. Therefore, I tried to show the audience the damage degree of plastic rubbish through editing techniques, and let people realize that if humans don’t stop destroying the landscape, these plastic rubbish will attack humans in turn.

 Moss and water hyacinth will replace the trash in ponds, and wind-blown branches encourage the growth of weeds. These are plants that grew rapidly after the landscape being damaged by human, just like Rita said “we must learn to live on this earth not in spite of capitalist ruination, but because of it.”(Rita, 2019), they can survive and multiplied rapidly after the damage by human or nature.

 I originally think of adding some special effects in the editing to make the shots look more destructive, but the special effects and the scene could not be perfectly integrated, so I gave up this thing and focused on improve the effectiveness of cataloging shots.

 The dynamic “coexistence of destruction and protection” has always been an issue about our environment. This display of ruined landscapes could hopefully provide the viewers with food for thought in our attempt to make protection outpace destruction. Also, Somehow human behaviors are uncontrollable, how to make the damaged plants survive after the landscape is disturbed by human beings is also a proposition I am very interested in.

 

References:

Haraway, DJ 2016, Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, North Carolina.