The Lindeka – When a City Ate a Book
19 November 2024
15.00
Film screening and talk with the director
cinematic ethnography and essay film created by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson in collaboration with Anita Mkizwana and Philisiwe Twijnstra. Produced by The Situated Ecologies Platform in South Africa and Sweden.
Decades after liberation in eThekwini-Durban, South Africa, the young woman Lindeka reads the book Malfeasance. In this essay, philosopher Michel Serres fleshes out the advent of the Anthropocene in his unique “French” manner. Serres does not trace the modern planetary present to the advent of agriculture, the industrial revolution, or even the postwar “great acceleration.” Rather, his narrative of the climate crisis starts with spitting in the soup—with tracing how humans of everyday and age used practices of pollution to own and create property, with industrial society following suit to appropriate land, rivers, and the skies through pollution. Lindeka is fascinated, but finds Serres’ narrative increasingly disturbing for what it omits: Where is eThekwini-Durban, or even Africa in this universalising history of our planet? Striking up a conversation with Michel, Lindeka decides to make her own study of historical difference and global connection. Using the camera and mobilising her city, Lindeka interviews people about ancestors, participates in rituals, walks the streets, and travels to mosques, temples, graveyards, sugarcane fields, and a slaughterhouse. Through this method of enrollment, and becoming enrolled, she reads the French philosopher against the grain of her body, her relations, and her location in the world.
This is the second film in a trilogy of ciné-ethnographies from South African cities. The first film “One Table Two Elephants” (2019) explored ways of knowing urban nature in the postcolonial city of Cape Town.
Inspired by Jean Rouch, the directors use montage and screenings in their cinematic-centred research practice, not only in a spirit of thinking through film, but specifically to devise a process of translation by which theoretical and text-based concepts that have guided them become transformed into a collaborative, place-based, and cinematic performative practice that contributes to the academic fields of Southern Urbanism, Political Ecology, and the Environmental Humanities
About the directors
Jacob von Heland is a filmmaker and ecologist of visual environmental humanities at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Henrik Ernstson is Professor in Sustainable Urban Development and Docent in Political Ecology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is also Honorary Senior Research Scholar in Human Geography at The University of Manchester, where he previously worked as Lecturer. He has been Honorary Associate Professor at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where he lived and worked for almost a decade and has been a Postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University in California.
Credits
Created by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson (idea, research, production, direction)
Anita Mkizwani, Key Cast,”Lindeka”, research collaborator
Philisiwe Twijnstra, Key Cast,”Camera Eye,” research collaborator
Jacob Von Heland, Principal photographer
Robert Eklund, Sound design
Nanna Dalunde, Coloration
Steve Jones, Voice recordings
Garth Walker, Graphic design
Laura Pietilä, Production assistant
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