POSSIBLE LANDSCAPES --DEBUT SCREENING
Cornell Cinema, 104 Willard Straight Hall
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
7:00 p.m.
Directed by Kannan Arunasalam
Produced and conceptualized by Tao DuFour and Natalie Melas
"For no one had yet written of this landscape
that it was possible.”
Derek Walcott
A collaboration between a documentary filmmaker, Kanan Arunasalam and two professors, Tao DuFour (Architecture) a spatial theorist and Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature) a postcolonial comparatist and scholar of Caribbean thought, Possible Landscapes is the outcome of the team research project, “Possible Landscapes: Documenting Environmental Experience in Trinidad and Tobago,” funded through the Cornell Migrations Initiative team research grant for the Mellon Just Futures Initiative. The aim was to develop methods of field research and representation in documentary film that foreground intergenerational lived experience of landscapes and environments in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and to query the formation of environmental and climate imaginaries, with a view to getting at larger historical questions—of migration, plantation societies, extractivism, race, and the legacies of colonialism—that inform everyday practices in ways that are difficult to identify and to articulate, because they are concretely lived.
Possible Landscapes joins seven people in seven different regions of the islands in the course of their daily lives: Kevin, a fisherman on the east coast suffering the recent loss of one of his crew members at sea; four generations of the Josephs family in the steep hillsides of the northern range; Captain ‘Spaceman’ Philips and his glass-bottomed boat in Tobago from which he has witnessed the decline of the coral reefs; Crystal, a trade unionist active in supporting workers who lost their jobs when a major oil refinery was closed; Romulas, known as the “last sugar cane farmer” in the central plains and his Venezuelan workers; Stephanie a nurse who worked in the oil fields in the south starting just after World War II; Tony, originally from Jamaica, a climate change analyst, agriculturalist and rabbit farmer in St Joseph.
POSSIBLE LANDSCAPES PROJECT
DEBORAH VILLARROEL-LAMB, "Towards Caribbean Coastal Resilience: Challenges and Opportunities" https://events.cornell.edu/event/deborah-villarroel-lamb-towards-caribbean-coastal-resilience-challenges-opportunities
MARIO LEWIS, "Forest Notebooks: The Interaction Between Art, Community, and Ecology"
Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities, Africana, Architecture, Comparative Literature, Literatures in English, Environment and Sustainability, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Romance Studies, the Institute for Comparative Modernities, and the College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Office.
Free and open to the public.
