Elemental Warfare

Talk by Svitlana Matviyenko

00:00

Free entry

This talk examines modern warfare as a mode of environmental and atmospheric occupation, terror, and suppression. Contemporary war is at once no longer reducible to territorial conquest and, at the same time, contained by densely militarized enclosures. Its destructive force increasingly targets populations arrested within necropolitical environments of terror, where warfare operates as a systematic assault on the elemental conditions that make living possible – air, soil, water – and on the essential life-supporting infrastructures. Violence no longer arrives solely through armed confrontation; it seeps into the very media we inhabit, saturating the sensory, communicative, and ecological milieus of everyday existence. Warfare extends not only across horizontal fronts but vertically, traversing atmospheric strata, soils, air, water reservoirs, and aquifers, as well as data streams. In such conditions, the environment becomes both a weapon and a medium of violence, and immediacy itself – whether of breath, sound, vibration, shock wave, or sensation – can be transformed into a conduit of terror. In these climates of war, the central questions shift.

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With kind support from the Embassy of Canada.