Geozoe

GEOZOE

Video, 7', 2022. Ana Dana Beroš + Matija Kralj Štefanić

Departing from the concept of geotrauma, a material reality onto which all of life on Earth is inscribed, a “soil metabolism” of toxicity accumulated and absorbed within the woundable collective body, we struggle to register the world between bios and geos — Life and Non-Life. There we find the realm of geontology, as coined by the critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli, or the sphere of Geozoe as we call it, where the living and the non-living cocreate unexpected modes of existence, and unanticipated forms of empowerment.

Documentation of the mounds of life jackets on the island of Lesvos can be seen as an emblematic site of necropolitics, where social and political powers dictate who may live and who is left to die. However, the site of exhaustion of human lives, which once had life, and now have none, and that could spur images of the walking dead, should actually trigger us to rethink the difference between life and non-life by asking how can we stop the collapse into death.

In that sense, the juxtaposed, more recent register of migrants’ residuals in a hidden bush in the vicinity of Zagreb's main railway yard, takes the figure of life. Povinelli calls that figure the animist, the one that collapses Non-Life into Life, claiming that everything is alive with potentiality. Leaning on the author’s “anthropology of ordinary suffering”, we focus further on the struggle for existence, the will and the strength to destroy all human identification used by biopolitical regimes, as documented in the burnt passports and other papers after the crossings of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian border into Croatia, EU.

Geozoe strives to put the emphasis on perseverance, endurance, and precarious survival, together with an articulate attention on documenting assemblages that surface in the congested spaces between life and death. Non-Life entities and extensions-into-Life are welcomed into the collective imaginary as “inanimate Animism” – a pulsating, breathing, living landscape of constant metamorphosis. And we ask ourselves, adapting the words of the anthropologist Martin Holbraad – might there be ‘a sense in which the ground could speak for themselves'? And if so, ‘what might their voices sound like’?

[References, coming soon]