War-torn EcologiesHuman and More-​​than-​Human Intersections of Ethnography and the ArtsUmut Yıldırım

Affective Ecology

Analytical attention to affective ecology has been adopted in anthropology, the arts, and environmental humanities as a way of thinking not about, but together with, the ecological elements of long-term destruction and resurgence that have resulted a ‘human-caused environmental catastrophe’. Following Donna Haraway’s invitation to understand becoming as ‘becoming with’ species with whom humans co-inhabit the world and Tsing’s call for ‘noticing’ unexpected life forms that emerge amidst capitalist wreckage within the larger context of climate change,1616Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 244; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). a new genre of affective thinking with ecology emerged. This genre of affective ecology positions itself against human-centric postulates where the human is endowed with extraordinary and exclusive cognitive capacities that transcend the natural world. They advocate instead for an ecologically infused percipience that is better equipped to confront both the analytical separation of human from other-than-human and the hierarchical postulate of life in which only humans have the capacity to feel, know, and think. This approach proposes that the political, rather than being distinct from the natural order, is always already intertwined with it, an analytical distinction that renders majoritarian politics’ claims to separation from the natural order subject to analysis. The political, we learn, emerges in the interstices and crevices of rational politics, shedding light on a new political sensorium wherein humans are deeply enmeshed in and forge political alliances with more-than-human others, from inanimate rocks endowed with spiritual capacities to rivers that are accepted as the ancestral kin of indigenous folk. At the same time that these interstices and crevices expose the magnitude of extinction under the so-called Anthropocene, they also point up imaginative pathways toward thinking with those fragmented ecological forms that unexpectedly regenerate themselves despite the scale of mass destruction.

In the new materialist approach, an affective ecology is conjugated, after Spinoza, as an affirmative category of ‘vibrancy’, ‘playfulness’, and ‘attunement’, qualities that emerge anew, despite late industrialism’s efforts to demolish them.1717See Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), esp. Donna J. Haraway, ‘Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble’, pp. M25–M50; Natasha Myers, ‘Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds: A More-than-Natural History of a Black Oak Savannah’, in Between Matter and Method, ed. by Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 73–96. Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers, for instance, have conceptualized an ‘affective ecology’ as an extensive, distributed, and entangling sensorium wherein affinities are built to deliver pleasurable, playful, creative encounters between scientists and plants.1818Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers, ‘Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters’, Differences, 23.3 (2012), pp. 74–118 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892907>. In this conception, the task at hand is to strategically ‘amplify’ vibrancy so as to strip ecology of its functionalist and hierarchical features and reimagine it as a playful flow that evidences both the traces of past inhabitation and possible responsive and responsible ways of co-cultivation with other species.1919Ibid., p. 79. The anthropologist or artist is now graced with the analytical capacity to become a ‘sensor’,2020Myers, ‘Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds’, p. 76. to witness the emergence of a responsive milieu built by a convivial community of plants and bacterial organisms in communication with one another through chemical signalling, and to follow the traces of damaged life that unexpectedly blossom amid colonial and capitalist rubble. The point is to build an ‘artful anthropology’2121Ibid., p. 73. that seeks to demonstrate aesthetical and practice-based modes of ‘decolonial land care’ that do not hinge on the destruction of the planet, but that illustrate ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’ under climate change.2222Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. by Tsing and others.

Tracing and thinking with battered yet tenacious indigenous worlds that centre interspecies relationality at their core; building a convergence between anthropology and the arts to arrive at an ecologically mindful aesthetics that raises the issue of responsibility and decolonial collaboration against ‘mad-made’ extinction exacerbated by the impending climate catastrophe — these ruminations interpret life as a vibrant ‘ecological sensorium’.2323Myers, ‘Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds’, p. 75. Haraway, for instance, has recently proposed to tune research in to the generative and mutual ‘capacity to respond’ between humans and their co-inhabitants to stimulate reflection on collective and creative forms of communication that she calls ‘worlding’.2424Haraway, ‘Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble’, pp. M38 and M25. Worlding is a reparative project that must include ‘mourning [the] irreversible losses’ that indigenous people have already been forced to endure under industrialist ecocide, but without necessarily ceasing the ongoing processes of making kin with the ecological features of the land.2525Ibid., p. M35. Haraway highlights two cases of what she terms ‘science art activism’.2626Ibid., p. M33. The Crochet Coral Reef is a collaborative art project knitted in crochet by some eight thousand people across twenty-seven countries that reconstructs a coral reef ecosystem made of waste reel-to-reel tape, plastic bags and wraps, discarded vinyl, and other discarded material to showcase the interconnection between global warming, pollution, and extinction. For Haraway, the responsiveness that the project generates is an example of consciousness raising that cultivates an interspecies relationality based on mutual responsibility and care to counter industrialist destruction: ‘we are all corals now.’2727Ibid., p. M39. Similarly, the Ako Project, an artistic inventory of spiritual, ritualistic, and ecological features of the rich biodiversity of Madagascar as understood and cared for by the Malagasy, provides a history of the damage done to terrain by colonial land grabbing, developmentalist extractivism, and failed humanitarian projects. For Haraway, affective ecology is a ‘sensible materialism’ that aesthetically invites attention to damaged local worlds responding to the immediate threat of extinction under climate change by engaging spiritual, ritualistic, and resistant local practices in an effort to protect highly distinctive ecological milieus and ancient knowledge systems.2828Ibid., p. M45.

Against the habitual relegation of the cosmological realm to superstition and the ecological field to primordial engagement in rational approaches to politics, Dorothy Kwek and Robert Seyfert draw attention to those battles that illustrate, in their words, an affective and ecological partition of the sensible.2929Dorothy H. B. Kwek and Robert Seyfert, ‘Affect Matters: Strolling through Heterological Ecologies’, Public Culture, 30.1 (2018), pp. 35–59 (p. 37) <https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-4189155>; see also Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010). An affective ecology is after ‘a more nuanced account of how human agencies are embedded within, constrained by, entangled with, and constituted by more-than-human others’, partly to ‘help us understand the full consequences and costs of what we imagine as “human” actions’.3030Ibid., p. 39. Consider the 140-year legal battle fought by the Māori iwi (tribe) of Whanganui for the Whanganui River in New Zealand to be acknowledged as a living ancestor and accorded the same legal status as a human being by the Australian settler state. Or the legal battle in Uttarakhand, northern India, for the Ganges and Yamuna rivers to be recognized as legal entities.

While the focus on interspecies mutuality and vibrancy under the so-called man-made extinction is descriptively important within the larger context of decolonial land struggles in the era of climate change, this volume considers some of this work as an exercise in ‘fascination with ecologically infused intimacies’ which, according to Kath Weston, is a ‘symptom — perhaps a sign, worthy of investigation in its own right’.3131Kath Weston, Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 4. That is, the romantic gesture toward vibrant mutuality remains problematic from this more-than-human ecology perspective, for it both restores the ‘ecological field’ as a precolonial condition with which to counter colonial and capitalist degradation and projects researchers’ ideals of wholesomeness and childlike innocence onto ‘nature’ and ‘natives’ as a way of brushing aside anxieties of contemporary planetary collapse. There is a conservative impulse in these accounts that hampers theoretical engagement with decolonial struggles and modern sites of eco-praxis occurring in worlds continuously and actively ravaged by the fourfold force of colonial occupation, genocidal annihilation, war, and capitalist extraction.

These problems were exemplified in the much-debated curatorial statement of the 16th Istanbul Biennial of 2018 that acknowledged both the necessity of ending the canonical Western division between nature and culture and the need for a transdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology and the arts when studying the so-called Anthropocene.3232Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Curator’s Statement’, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2019 <https://bienal.iksv.org/en/16th-istanbul-biennial/curator-s-statement> [accessed 30 March 2022]. The colonialist and primordialist underpinnings of the Biennial’s curatorial statement, which considers the ethnographer and the artist as ‘foreigners’ who ‘immerse’ themselves in ‘unknown societies’ in order to attain a ‘renewed exoticism’, not only whitewashes the powerful decolonial critique emanating from within the discipline of anthropology against the roles of the researcher as a ‘colonizer’, an ‘outsider’, and an ‘objective observer’. It also suffers from its argumentative grounding in the much-disputed and long-exhausted decolonial framework of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, wherein Amazonian natives, as the epitomes of purity and wisdom, become the repository of the (white, heterosexual, cis-male) anthropologist’s colonial and structuralist fantasies of fighting back against the Anthropocene.3333For exquisite critiques, see Lucas Bessire and David Bond, ‘Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique’, American Ethnologist, 41.3 (2014), pp. 440–56 <https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12083>; David Graeber, ‘Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying “Reality”: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5.2 (2015), pp. 1–41 <https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.003>; Orin Starn, ‘HERE COME THE ANTHROS (AGAIN): The Strange Marriage of Anthropology and Native America’, Cultural Anthropology, 26.2 (2011), pp. 179–204 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01094.x>. Recent Amazonian ethnographies, which potentially have much to offer to discussions on decolonial land struggles and coalition-building, suffer from a similar kind of theoretical and aesthetical myopia that the curatorial statement embodies, where the invitation to ‘decolonize thought’3434Compare Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). and ‘provincialize reason’ deliver seriously exoticizing political consequences that obfuscate the consideration of decolonial ecological programmes and praxis of modern horizons.3535Umut Yıldırım, ‘Resistant Breathing: Ruined and Decolonial Ecologies in a Middle Eastern Heritage Site’, Current Anthropology, forthcoming. Recent anthropological works, for instance, prompt us to move beyond a mere acceptance of anthropological thinking as a transparent epistemological field and instead to undo its exoticizing methodological underpinnings.3636Jafari Sinclaire Allen and Ryan Cecil Jobson, ‘The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties’, Current Anthropology, 57.2 (2016), pp. 129–48 <https://doi.org/10.1086/685502>; Ryan Cecil Jobson, ‘The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019’, American Anthropologist, 122.2 (2020), pp. 259–71 <https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398>. Rather than delving deeper into the archives of structuralism with a relativist and ontological twist under the guise of decolonial thought and its reverberating curatorial aesthetics, this volume offers fresh insights into what happens to life as the effects and threat of organized mass violence continue to reverberate across species throughout war-torn worlds and their diasporas. The analytical eschewal of the constitutive spiral of mass violence in the Middle Eastern sites in which we work is an ethnographic, aesthetical, conceptual, and political life sentence. The Biennial’s curatorial statement promotes an ecological sensitivity that callously ignores the violence of militarist extraction by war and genocide endured and pushed back by communities, an especially egregious aporia considering the exhibition’s location in Turkey where war against the Kurds has been ongoing in the context of the state’s denial of the Armenian genocide.

To put it differently, it is no coincidence that projects like the Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, which promotes the urgency of attending to the so-called Anthropocene as the ultimate form of political responsibility and as the motor force of intellectual and artistic inquiry in the era of climate change, have found their way to the Istanbul Biennial.3737‘Feral Atlas Collective’, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2019 <https://bienal.iksv.org/en/bienal-artists/feral-atlas-collective> [accessed 30 March 2022]. This interactive digital platform, a five-year project of digital environmental humanities from Stanford University Press curated by Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, involves one hundred artists, scientists, and anthropologists.3838Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, ed. by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and others (Stanford University Press, 2021) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.21627/​2020fa>. Led by Tsing, who in 2020 was named one of the most powerful people in the artworld in Art Review’s ‘Power 100’, an annual ranking of the most influential people in art, the project develops further the central arguments of Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin and sets itself the task of committing ‘more-than-human histories’ to ‘cultivate vital forms of recognition and response to the urgent environmental challenges of our times’.3939Ibid. Designed as an interactive, work-in-progress digital document, the Atlas studies the unexpected ecological consequences of industrial infrastructures such as plantations, shipping routes, factories, dams, power stations, and drilling rigs. Species facing mass extinction due to monocrop farming, viruses, and bacteria generated by industrial plant and animal production sites, dumping grounds for industrial waste, and life emerging anew amidst capitalist destruction — all make their way into the Atlas. Now faced with critiques of their earlier universalist,4040Vansintjan, ‘Going beyond the “Ecological Turn” in the Humanities’, Entitle Blog – A Collaborative Writing Project on Political Ecology, 2016 <https://entitleblog.org/2016/03/01/going-beyond-the-ecological-turn-in-the-humanities/> [accessed 26 July 2019]. racist,4141Vergès, ‘Racial Capitalocene’. and colonialist4242Zoe Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word for Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 29.1 (2016), pp. 4–22 <https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124>. constitution, the anthropologies of the Anthropocene have recently been revised to incorporate geographies and histories of genocide and colonialism into their framework and attend to the uneven ecological traces and effects of these oppressive systems that dominate landscapes with large industrial patches.4343See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt, ‘Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20’, Current Anthropology, 60.S20 (2019), pp. S186–97 <https://doi.org/10.1086/703391>. Yet still the revised framework’s consideration of mass violence remains reductive: the violent processes of colonial occupation and extraction are taken on as a mere analytical issue of inclusivity, a move that diversifies the conceptual framework of the Anthropocene but does not radically alter it.

The point with this volume is not to lift up, buttress, or nuance the notion of the Anthropocene with an ‘add Middle Eastern geographies and stir’ approach. Instead, the reflections here aim to counter head-on the constitutive indifference to processes of racialization and geographical profiling that are embedded in the very notion of the Anthropocene, while at the same time being mindful of the epistemological violence of the terminological focus on vibrancy, radical alterity, and climactic urgency. Fine-tuning Gaston Gordillo’s4444Gastón R. Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 20. proposal to understand colonial space as a negatively charged affective constellation that is enmeshed with rubbled objects and (we add) ecological debris that appear around the edges of destruction, the volume meditates on ecology’s war-torn yet resistant affective movement in the Middle East. This is to arrive at war-torn ecologies.

War-torn Ecologies

In this volume, the will to challenge the structuring role of the imperialist and genocidal underpinnings of Eurocentric epistemologies in defining and constituting contemporary theories of affect is articulated under the rubric of war-torn ecologies. In undoing the violence that epistemological and aesthetical overreliance on white genealogies generates, this volume takes its lead from two works on critical human geography that focus on race in the US context. War-torn Ecologies proposes to interlace Middle Eastern ecologies with what Ruth Wilson Gilmore4545Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence’, in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017), pp. 225–40. has termed an ‘abolitionist geography’ and what Katherine McKittrick4646Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). refers to as ‘demonic grounds’. Rather than forcing analysis into a continuous spiral of destruction, abolitionist geography seeks to free the ‘still-to-be-achieved’ work of emancipation from processes of ‘hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion’4747Gilmore, ‘Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence’, p. 228. intrinsic to colonial encroachment and imperialist violence. Taking raced structures of feeling to be constitutive of the bonding between human and environmental processes, Gilmore provides us with a conceptual toolkit for challenging normative perspectives in which territory and liberation are mutually exclusive terms to be alienated and then occupied by militarist technologies such as ‘sales, documents, or walls’.4848Ibid., p. 238. A project not ‘only by, for, or about Black people’,4949Ibid. abolitionist geography embraces the political strategy of discussing raced sites of destruction together with praxis.

McKittrick’s ‘demonic grounds’ is one such abolitionist geography. ‘The built environment and the material landscape are sites that are intensely experiential and uneven, and deeply dependent on psychic, imaginary work’,5050Ibid., p. 2. McKittrick writes. In retracing the pathways of lost or trivialized knowledge in geographical canons, McKittrick shows how a seeming site of oppression can in fact be ‘a terrain of political struggle’.5151Ibid., p. 8. These demonic grounds not only spatially locate and push back against structures and patters of domination and exploitation that subordinate Black women’s bodies, sexualities, subjectivities, and desires, they also provide a generative account of how Black imaginaries lie at the very core of the unfinished work of liberation and struggle over social space.

The present volume finds comradery in these works, as they furnish a set of concepts for understanding how ecology is an integral yet resistant part of ongoing militarist expansion, racism, and geographical debilitation. Accordingly, our works are influenced by recent anthropological accounts that bridge the gap between the otherwise disparate fields of materiality, affect, and war in the Middle East.5252Salih Can Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Kenneth MacLeish and Zoë H. Wool, ‘US Military Burn Pits and the Politics of Health’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly Critical Care Blog, 2018 <https://medanthroquarterly.org/critical-care/2018/08/us-military-burn-pits-and-the-politics-of-health/> [accessed 24 March 2022]. We learn from these accounts that imperialist and colonial (mis)management of military waste in the Middle East disturbs accounts of planetary connectedness and continuity under climate change by actively producing toxic landscapes and legacies of living. Kenneth MacLeish and Zoë Wool, for instance, show how the open-air burn pits on US bases into which the US military and contractor firms have been dumping waste in Iraq release toxic chemicals that have resulted in illnesses among US Iraq War veterans.5353MacLeish and Wool, ‘US Military Burn Pits and the Politics of Health’. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins similarly demonstrates how the environmentalist rescue work of ‘saving the planet’ frames and shapes the technocratic management of trash in Palestine as an issue of ‘environmental peace building’5454Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege, p. 189. that not only enables claims made to the West Bank’s environment by the Israeli state and international technocrats, but also covers up the actual wounds of the occupation inflicted by Israel. Moving the analytical lens away from the world of US veterans and decision-making technocrats, Kali Rubaii meditates on the ‘toxic legacies’ of the occupation of Iraq to show how military waste including bombs, bullets, chemical weaponry, open-air burn pits, and junkyards is not mere background to occupation but actively constitutes the landscape by turning cancer and congenital illness into ordinary occurrences.5555Kali Rubaii, ‘Birth Defects and the Toxic Legacy of War in Iraq’, Middle East Report, 296 (Fall 2020) <https://merip.org/2020/10/birth-defects-and-the-toxic-legacy-of-war-in-iraq-296/> [accessed 12 November 2022]. Salih Can Açıksöz further illustrates that, in the context of the ongoing war in northern Kurdistan between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement organized around the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and given their function as the ultimate political symbol of sacrifice for the Turkish nation, disabled Turkish veterans returning home to Turkish cities linger affectively in the martial ecology of the mountains by physically embodying the visceral traces of a ‘pastoral devastated by war and littered with ruins and military garbage’.5656Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs, p. 21. The affective state of ‘being-on-the-mountains’5757See chapter one in ibid., p. 15. under war is a sensorial amalgamation of ‘heightened perception and [a] sense of vulnerability’5858Ibid., p. 35. for soldiers faced with impending lethal danger on the battlefield that lingers on into the post-return urban present as various affective states of conquest, unexpected shock, classed and gendered disappointment when their expectation of being politically crowned as war heroes falls flat.

The present volume attempts something more by thinking through ecological constellations from the perspective of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives are interrupted and violated by ongoing ecocide, even after the sporadic spiral of mass violence briefly ends and the ‘white man’ leaves only to be replaced with incoming troops. War-torn Ecologies orients the reader into brown worlds where life is occupied, debilitated, and constituted by war, colonial ecocide, genocidal aftermaths, and genocide denialism; where life is routinely illegalized, rendered undocumentable, and unaccountable by sovereign states and their imperialist allies; where life is brimming with brown feelings of refusal, with a brown affective dramaturgy that illustrates ecological protraction and praxis amidst genocidal ruins, war rubble, and toxicity.

An-Archic Fragments, Aesthetical Interventions

War-torn Ecologies creates an an-archic encounter between anthropology and the arts with a critical perspective that builds on recent work that casts doubt on the ostensibly intrinsic ‘goodness’ of artistic practices. In her analysis of the contemporary art world in Turkey and Germany, Banu Karaca5959Banu Karaca, The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). has demonstrated how artistic production serves as a violent medium of ‘systematic forgetting’,6060Ibid., p. 140. a smokescreen that enables settler states and their corporate allies to whitewash and deny the genocides, displacements, and dispossessions they themselves carry out. The violent ‘civilizing mission’ intrinsic to the history of art and its institutions generates common-sensical definitions of citizenship while simultaneously contravening the self-declared emancipatory power of art and its institutions. Karaca encourages her readers to think through economic dispossession and aesthetic absences and omissions in national art histories and collections.

Creative acts that expose and denounce the underlying connections between war profiteering, philanthropic investment in the arts sector, imperialist processes of geographical occupation, as well as the institutional and curatorial strategies that omit such facts sow the seeds of war-torn ecologies by debunking the myth that the art world in contemporary global metropoles is somehow innocent of centuries of colonial, slaving, extractivist, and warmongering accumulation. Consider the call of the Décoloniser les arts initiative in France, which creates campaigns to expose and denounce censorship and structural racism in French artistic circles and institutions and carves out spaces of action for the aesthetic recognition of Afrodescendant imaginaries, not as objects of tolerance that fulfil white fantasies of inclusivity and diversity for a better France, but as wounded yet generative critical forces to be reckoned with on their own terms. Consider the artistic and activist intervention that emerged in the wake of the MoMA exhibition in New York, ‘Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011’, from November 2019 to early March 2020.6161‘Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011’, The Museum of Modern Art, 2019 <https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5084> [accessed 1 April 2022].This massive assemblage featuring works by Iraqi and Kuwaiti artists at home and in the diaspora who have lived through US-manufactured occupations and two Gulf wars was contested by a series of interventions that revealed the implication of two trustees of its institutional affiliate, MoMA PS1, in private prisons, ICE detention centres, private military contractors, and the arms trade that had directly caused some of the destruction on public display at the exhibition. While some Arab artists were denied entry to the US to attend the opening, others withdrew their works in protest or requested room to reorient their works to expose the warmongering philanthropy that is intrinsic to the art world. Consider Decolonize This Place, an activist and artistic collaboration that germinated from the Occupy Wall Street movement which seeks to fuel struggles around ‘indigeneity, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification’,6262‘Palestine’, Decolonize This Place, 2020 <https://decolonizethisplace.org/palestine-1> [accessed 1 April 2022]. and Forensic Architecture’s interventions in the Whitney Biennial in 2019. The latter exposed Whitney board member Warren B. Kanders’ ownership of the Safariland Group, which manufactured tear gas to be used against migrants at the US–Mexico border and in the Gaza Strip in Palestine. When Artforum, one of the most powerful publications in the contemporary art world, published a letter by Ciarán Finlayson, Tobi Haslett, and Hannah Black titled ‘The Tear Gas Biennial’, which invited artists to withdraw their work from the Biennial in protest, ongoing rallying in alternative platforms such as Hyperallergic managed to reach a wider audience. While Decolonize This Place endorsed staffers’ demand for the resignation of the board member, Forensic Architecture, before finally withdrawing from the Biennial, ignited the scene with a declaration that their contribution would consist of a video focusing on the tear gas produced by the company. As another example of protest art, consider Hito Steyerl’s lecture performance ‘Is the Museum a Battlefield?’ where she explores the linkage between corporate sponsorship and warmongering in the context of the war between the Kurdish movement organized around the PKK and the Turkish state. The video work documents her journey of discovery of the fact that the Turkish machine-gun bullet that killed her friend Andrea Wolf in 1998 had been manufactured by Lockheed Martin, which was a sponsor of the 13th Istanbul Biennial where she delivered her work, and the patron of her exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. With a similar twist, Steyerl recently staged a performance at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin in 2019 requesting German state-run art institutions to exclude her work from their portfolio of ‘external cultural diplomacy’ until Germany recognizes the Turkish invasion of Kurdish areas in northeast Syria. Consider the 2019 performative intervention by the collective BP or Not BP? in which three hundred and fifty participants roamed the British Museum in protest of the mass-scale exhibition ‘I Am Ashburnipal, King of the World, King of Assyria’ in 2019, which contained many artefacts looted from what is now Iraq and whose primary sponsor was the British oil and gas company BP. The BP or Not BP? crew staged another intervention in 2019 by occupying the British Museum with a massive prop of the Trojan Horse in protest of BP’s sponsorship of the exhibit ‘Troy: Myth and Reality’. The performative work raised concerns about the ecological devastation caused by BP’s work on the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline, a major gas transport line running across Turkey that passes from the site of ancient Troy.

While aesthetical interventions that showcase the militarist logic and investment inherent in the art-washing of mass violence buttress the notion of war-torn ecologies, this volume shifts the lens to think together with conceptual works that foment endurance and resistance in war-torn worlds and re-root ruptures by resisting erasure.

In ‘Mulberry Affects’, my own work explores the ruderal mulberry trees that line the shores of the Tigris River in the city of Amed, the informal capital of Greater Kurdistan, the Armenian name of which was and is Dikranagerd. Mulberry trees were no mere decorative detail set against the enormity of this ancient city and the surrounding destroyed villages but rather an-archic fragments of the genocidal erasure of Armenians, as well as Syriacs since the anti-Christian pogroms of 1895 and the still ongoing war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement organized around the PKK. By paying attention to the archival erasure of Armenian nativity to the land and the resistant roots of centenarian mulberry trees that are scattered across the Tigris riverbank, I attempt to raise questions around supposedly ‘abandoned’ ecological sites.

With her video work ‘Who’s Afraid of Ideology?’ artist Marwa Arsanios creates an-archic fragments of occupation in Rojava made of wild medicinal plants, fig trees planted by the Syrian regime, Kurdish guerrillas, and female farmers in the Jinwar commune, literally, the ‘place of women’, a village built on land reappropriated for the exclusive use of women in Rojava. Self-defence here is ongoing daily work that is deeply enmeshed in ecology. Self-defence is a medicinal-plant manifesto; a mundane praxis of land and community care resisting the threat of militarist offence and colonial occupation.

Kali Rubaii invites her readers to ethnographically sense a war-torn landscape of ‘toxic legacy’ in Iraq, where the spectacular and the ordinary merge to evidence an ecological constellation constituted by the military rubble of the Second Gulf War (2003); where toxic war materials occupy bodies with premature death, cancer, and congenital illness; where war chemicals infiltrate the atmosphere, water, and soil, and lodge in people’s dreams and experiences as ghosts and spiritual entities such as jinns.

An-archic fragments emerge in the artistic work of Nadine Hattom as she builds a new aesthetical world on the broken shell and fragmented memories of the occupation of her family home in Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) and the First Gulf War (1990–99) with ‘Shadows’, a series of ten digitally modified photographs from the US Department of Defense Operation Iraqi Freedom archive. Hattom builds an affective montage between the desert landscape of her homeland and the ‘sandy dunes’ that she discovers by accident in an ancient black forest in her exilic new home in Germany that serve as a military training field for American troops before they are deployed to Iraq. Sand is her affective association with the flora, fauna, earth, and sky of her homeland, the ecological elements and the brown palette that exert a war-torn yet enduring force that haunts the artist even when she is building new homes elsewhere.

In South Lebanon, Munira Khayyat takes us to an agricultural world where herders farm under a military chokehold supervised by Israeli patrols and occasionally have to follow their goats into a grey zone that lies between a fence separating Lebanon and Israel and the ‘Blue Line’ of the United Nations-designated frontier. Technologies of death are somewhat thwarted by the lively, resistant, multi-species ecologies of the borderland. Tricking mines is by no means an easy art or an accurate science, and the threat of death-in-livelihood is ever-present.

Collectively, our encounters as anthropologists and artists inspires us to build an ecologically-infused perspective on mass violence. We do this by embracing dissident forms of anthropological and artistic research that contest commonsensical narratives of geopolitical supremacy, militarist normalcy, and climatic urgency. We embrace remembrance, endurance, and praxis. We breathe steadfastly against war.

Ours is the gesture of reclaiming brown breath.