Isabel Rocamora - In Shock and Diffidence: Imaging an Ethics of the Earth with Heidegger (a practitioner approach to climate emergency in the Scottish Highlands and Islands)

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a presentation from Isabel Rocamora Abstract: My current moving image project, The Deep, focuses on Scotland’s rich and coveted natural resources to consider the impacts of human actions and technologies on the environment and local communities – groundwater contamination, air and sound pollution, the fracturing and depletion of the earth’s integrity – alongside the vitalising connection between human life and the forces of nature. The aim of this paper is to share concrete ways in which Heidegger’s mid-30s’ Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and “The Origin of the Work of Art” inspire and inform the conceptual frame, structure and aesthetic principles guiding my creative process. I do this in three moves. I first place factual research findings in dialogue with a Heideggerian ‘Ethics of the Earth’, which I locate in the interplay (or strife) between the sense of “emergency” (Polt 2006) characterising our anthropogenic epoch (for Heidegger the “abandonment” of being and nature in “machination” and 39 surface experience) and the originary “emergence” of being, nature and world (Storey 2015). This oscillating event – thought by Heidegger as one of appropriation, ereignis – helps me imagine an artwork that, while remaining mindful of “the background” that makes our world meaningful, offers an open (because interruptive) site for the intensification of thinking and questioning, in realtime. For me, after Heidegger and in dialogue with Zabala (2017), this means summoning in the viewer “shock and diffidence” – trauma and awe, emergency and emergence – through visual treatments of scale, juxtaposition, rupture and temporality. I illustrate my process with photographic experiments that, placing the ancient geologies of the low-lying Outer Hebrydes alongside gigantic decommissioned North Sea oil rigs today berthed in Cromarty Firth, aim to plunge us into a sense of “deep time” (Wood 2019), attuning us to self and world in a present moment from which a sustainable future on Earth may be freshly envisaged. Biography: Isabel Rocamora is a moving image artist and scholar working at the intersections of ethics, aesthetics and phenomenology. She received her AHRC-funded PhD on relations between experimental cinema and Heidegger’s early ontology from the University of Edinburgh (2019) and is presently a visiting scholar-artist at Pompeu Fabra University, Center for Vattimo’s Philosophy and Archives. Isabel’s multi-awarded moving image works have been widely exhibited, e.g.: Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Koffler Gallery, Toronto; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Austrian Cultural Forum, NYC; and Channel 4 UK. Recent publications include a practitioner essay in Cinematic Intermediality (EUP). Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/