Readings:
Nixon-slow-violence-and-the-environmentalism-of-the-poor<1-14
Demos, Decolonizing Nature, 199-215
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June 18 Slow Violence
16 thoughts on “June 18 Slow Violence”
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The more I thought about this lecture, the more I realized how narrow my definition of violence has always been. When I hear the word violence, I usually think about war, physical harm, or some kind of disaster that happens all at once. I don’t normally think about violence as something that can unfold over years, decades, or even generations. That is what made Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence so interesting to me.
What really stood out to me was how much attention we give to dramatic events and how little attention we give to things that happen gradually over time. Things like pollution, toxic waste, climate change, and environmental destruction don’t happen in a single moment. They build up slowly, which makes them easier to ignore even though the damage can be enormous. It made me think about how many environmental problems become normalized simply because they happen so gradually.
Something else that stuck with me was the idea that the people who suffer the most from environmental harm are often the people who contributed the least to it. The lecture discussed communities that are left dealing with contaminated land, polluted water, and long erm health problems while those responsible are often far removed from the consequences. That really made me think about how environmental issues are also issues of inequality and justice.
I also kept thinking about the role of art in all of this. One of the questions raised in the lecture was how we make slow violence visible when it doesn’t create a single shocking image. A hurricane or explosion can be captured in a photograph, but how do you show decades of pollution or environmental degradation? I think this is where art becomes so important. Art has the ability to make people stop and pay attention to things that might otherwise remain invisible.
Overall, this lecture changed the way I think about violence. It made me realize that some of the most harmful things happening in the world are not always the most visible. Sometimes harm happens so slowly that people learn to live with it or stop noticing it altogether. For me, the biggest takeaway was that just because something isn’t dramatic or immediate doesn’t mean it isn’t destructive.
I really liked how you question the visibility of slow violence, as it can’t be captured as effectively as a hurricane. I think it’s an important question for the artists who work in that direction. What comes to mind are different “before” and “after” pictures when you look at the consequences of deforestation
I find slow violence to be an especially interesting concept. Isn’t all violence slow in a way? I come at this from a Native American perspective, first and foremost, as someone having an ancestral connection to the lands of the current United States of America, which has demonstrated to people, indigenous or not, the degree to which all violence is slow. The Native condition is one of slow violence.
A small group of colonizers landed in a relatively restricted land, and likely would have died were it not for the immense support from their mother nations. They then slowly pushed westward and across the hemisphere, subjecting indigenous people to all sorts of ceaseless violence until we were collapsed into the blood quantum, or reservations, out of sight and out of mind. Violence happened in bursts, certainly. King Phillip’s War, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee. But all of these events were brought upon slowly with years of slow violence, like a pot being brought to a boil. Even a century after the majority of warring and “fast violence” has been committed, slow violence continues. The environment is being destroyed with pipelines and mining operations; Native Americans face worse health outcomes, like the highest rates of cancer in our society. Restricted to the rez, people are left in crippling economic conditions and frequently experience borderline famine conditions. This violence was never quick.
Seeing the Yes Men get on national television and cause stock prices to plummet serves not only as an incredible piece of socially responsive art, but also as a grand satire. Stock prices plummeted after their stunt because investors feared profits would fall. Ideally, they would skyrocket, as people began to invest in the least morally corrupt company in the DOW. One piece of art that connects my rant about native environmental slow violence to the Yes Men is another piece of performance art, the Ghost Dance movement. During the peak of the Native Genocide, “Ghost Dancers” in the northern plains began holding ground at holy sites and sites of occupation to reclaim the land and grant spiritual significance to the sites. This was done through intricate cultural dances that each nation had preserved for centuries. By peacefully protesting and highlighting their heritage, the Ghost Dancers were able to draw attention to the hypocrisy of the American government when, ultimately, over 300 Lakota were killed by the end of the 2-year movement. While none of the Yes Men had to die to call out the American markets, they both functionally had the same effect. Performance art is a powerful vehicle for critiquing the obviously hypocritical.
I thought this was a really important analysis and perspective on how genocide is committed simultaneously through “fast” and slow violence, and is also tied to economic conditions (like the example you gave of Native Americans restricted to reservations often experiencing famine-like conditions.) It reminded me of a point in one of the readings about how many developing nations impacted the most by environmental destruction are also under massive debts to the IMF and World Bank. Thank you for sharing this!
One idea from the lecture that stood out to me is Rob Nixon’s argument that slow violence is difficult to see because it unfolds gradually over time. What interested me most, however, is not only the environmental damage itself but the question of visibility. The lecture repeatedly showed that some forms of suffering become major news stories while others remain largely ignored. This suggests that slow violence is not simply an environmental problem; it is also a problem of representation.
The example of Agent Orange in Vietnam was especially powerful. While the war is often remembered through dramatic images of bombing and combat, the long-term health effects and environmental destruction caused by chemical defoliants receive far less attention. Nixon argues that violence should be understood not only in terms of space and bodies but also through time. The consequences of Agent Orange continue decades after the war officially ended, demonstrating how environmental damage can persist across generations.
This idea connects to T.J. Demos’s discussion of decolonizing nature. Demos argues that environmental issues cannot be separated from histories of colonialism and unequal power relations. The communities that suffer the most environmental harm are often those with the least political and economic power. In the lecture, this was evident in examples such as polluted public water systems, toxic waste in poorer regions, and electronic waste sites in Africa. These cases show how environmental burdens are frequently shifted onto marginalized populations while wealthier societies remain insulated from the consequences.
What I find most interesting is the role of art in making slow violence visible. Because environmental destruction often occurs gradually and far from public attention, artists must find creative ways to make people experience what is otherwise invisible. Works discussed in the lecture, such as Katie Paterson’s project that allowed people to hear a melting glacier, transform distant environmental processes into something immediate and personal. Rather than simply documenting environmental problems, these artworks challenge viewers to rethink their relationship to time, responsibility, and global inequality.
In this sense, environmental art is not just about nature. It is about revealing hidden connections between ecology, politics, and social justice, making visible forms of violence that would otherwise remain unnoticed.
After I finished watching the lecture, I went to check AP news out of curiosity. After scrolling through the app for some time, the first nature-related thing that I found was under the video section. It was about how the ancient tree said to shelter Robin Hood back in the day has died. Those are sad news, but not necessarily violent ones. Scrolling even further down, there is an article about meat allergy caused by ticks and another article about FDA vape approval. After photos, and lifestyle, and sports, and health, and local news, and crime, and technologies, there is finally a climate section. I didn’t even know that there was a climate section in AP news. To be completely honest, I mostly look through their notifications. National Science Foundation reverses decision to dismantle oceans-monitoring network after an outcry. This is actually very nice, however, I didn’t know they were dismantling it in the first place.
9/12 Front Page speaks volumes. 9/11 has changed the world forever. It was probably a terrible day to have a birthday. Weird to think that there were people celebrating birthdays, having funerals, and even weddings during that day. Any other major event was completely forgotten. While Hand-Peter Feldman’s work mostly centers around fast violence, I couldn’t help but think that it is slow violence too. There are still advertisements all over the city helping people claim compensation if they had certain diseases caused by 9/11. The tragedy created large amounts of air pollution, the consequences of which are still visible to this day. I don’t see that many news covering how 9/11 affects people today, but that might change this year as 9/11 25th anniversary is coming up in September.
I also wonder if the air quality in New York has changed over time. In my hometown, there would be some days in the Summer when the ash would fall from the otherwise clear sky. That usually meant that a field somewhere outside of the city is on fire. That was relatively common. We also had peat fires every once in a while. However, I don’t think the air was that polluted because of it. Smoke Cloud by Peter de Cupere reminded me heavily of the day a couple of years ago when the air in New York turned brown because of the forest fires in Canada. There were reports that being outside that day was like smoking six cigarettes.
After this week’s lecture and readings, I have started to better understand the impact that artists can have on the way we not only take care of our environment but of ourselves. Nevertheless, a piece of art that stood out to me the most was “Vatnajokull” (the sound of) 2007/8 by Katie Paterson. Compared to other works of art, I found this to be more interesting because at first sight it is just a phone number in an “old school” LED sign. However, our curiosity will enable us to want to call the number and that is where this art work comes to life. I mean how creative and cool is that? Most importantly it does the same as other world of art in the video or that we have seen in the past videos. While the message is the same and the activism is present, this piece literally evokes the person to actively listen to the consequences that we slowly bring upon. This helped me better understand the concept of “slow violence” that Rob Nixon describes.
Immediately after understanding Paterson’s art work, I was able to connect it immediately to the overall theme of “slow violence”. That is to say, Paterson challenges us to not just see the consequences of climate change but to understand how it happens over time and how it sounds as it is happening live.Usually we will see the photographs of the aftermaths or art that shows us what we have done or how we should feel. But what we fail to realize is that as we try to display the aftermath and/or consequences we are not actively slowing it down. Just how exercise can overtime benefit our heart, brain, and muscles. It happens slowly and the effect comes last.
Just imagine if we had the chance to actively listen to the ice melting instead of just seeing a chart that shows sea levels rising. It makes it a more intimate experience because we are able to realize that it is happening at that very moment. It is slowly happening but it is a process that is happening nonetheless.
The lecture and works of art definitely makes me rethink how time works in our world. Time quite literally does not stop. While we eat, sleep, and go about our day, many actions, even those that stem from the past, are slowly affecting our future by harming our environment. Yet, while this is the message, it is hard to actually measure the impact that the world of art has on us as students, or simply the viewers of art. It is cool that we are studying this but how do we know if we are making the change or simply just taking in this information?
Hey Lisalynn, I liked reading your response and you make a great point about the Vatnajokull with the usage of a phone number. Not only is it interactive but sparks curiosity on what can be on the receiving end of that phone number. You mentioning the thought of us actively listening to glaciers melt reminded me of the NY Times interactive reading he sent out and how we can hear the whales sounds being drowned out by the air guns used for finding oil in the article. The continuation of pieces like that can be well used for showing slow violence
At the start of the lecture, I was confused by the term “slow violence”. When violence comes to mind, I just think of the usual physical and aggressive behaviors towards one individual to another. That was my standard thought when it came to violence but after the lecture I felt like it has expanded a lot more especially when it comes to the environment. I personally did not connect the usage of the word violence towards the environment because us as people cannot physically grab the environment as a whole and harm it. I think about it more in a literal sense for some odd reason. I think it would be a hard concept to grasp of “Slow Violence” due to its lack of visibility, how can you bring this into a visual representation of it? I thought another interesting point that was brought up but also unfortunately expected is that the lack of representation for slow violence is a result of who it majorly affects which is the impoverished. It just makes sense unfortunately because had it affected the rich, this would have way more attention.
I think the lecture provided many great examples of slow violence and the one in particular I enjoyed was Smoke Cloud. The artwork is so well made in my opinion because you can interact with it, to me it is the best way to grab someone’s attention to participate and try to gain some new point of view/ experience from it. The way it looks at first glance makes it seem so beautiful because of the clouds and possibly an artwork that can be admired for that beauty. Yet when you step onto that ladder and climb to the top, your sense of smell is overwhelmed by the smell of pollution. Peter De Cupere doing that does make me enjoy it so much because I think some people overly focus on the beauty of an art piece rather than the message. The placement of the must’ve worked in its favor, people would be drawn to a ladder leading up to the art work. Even then if you come back down from that, you probably wonder why it smells like that and then actually try to figure it out. I would personally question why it would smell like that and look for the reason. Another point that was made in the lecture was the way the person appears too when they reach the top does an added visual representation of “head in the clouds”. The phrase is extremely fitting too with how we can be in our own thoughts for so long until we get hit by reality that brings us to new perspectives.
What draws me to these topics is the way they connect, particularly how environmental consequences are woven into stories we tend to frame purely as human conflicts. Most major news coverage of violence or war focuses on the immediate and the visible, the moment of impact and the aftermath. But violence extends far beyond what the camera can capture. It persists in soil, in water, in the people who were never present for the original event. As has been noted in the lecture, violence is more expansive than we typically see it in mainstream visual journalism, and I think that gap between what photography can show and what violence actually does is one of the most urgent problems.
This is part of why Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 9/12 resonates with me. By collecting front pages from around the world on the day after September 11th, Feldmann shows the editorial architecture behind image selection, how a single event gets refracted through dozens of perspectives, each making a distinct choice about what to show and how large to make it. But isn’t that the Western news perspective? That project made me think about the asymmetry in how American news outlets present violence. Images of conflict and suffering from elsewhere appear regularly on front pages, processed through a kind of detached visual language. But images of violence happening here tend to be treated differently, and that should be thought about.
I think it connects back to the environmental part. If we struggle to visually view political violence on our own soil, we’re even less equipped to grapple with its slower, less spectacular forms like the contaminated land, the generational trauma, environmental racism, and many more forms of violence. Photography alone may never fully tell those stories.
One piece of artwork that stood out to me from this week’s lecture was Martha Rosler’s “B-52 in Baby’s Tears” (1972) depicting a grassy field with one section in the shape of an airplane completely blackened and destroyed, representing the environmental destruction caused by napalm dropped onto Vietnamese soil by the American military. I thought it was interesting how this artwork, the lecture, and both readings all connected the idea of violence and slow violence through environmental destruction to colonialism and war, and the idea that the people most impacted by this kind of violence are the poor and those in the global south who not only experience immediate, “spectaular” violence from explosions, bombings, warfare, etc but also the intergenerational effects of cancerous radiation, famine, trauma, and birth defects which lead to millions of additional casualties that are not counted as being caused by colonial or military conflict.
One of the readings mentioned an example of “jellyfish babies” born in the Marshall Islands, years after extensive nuclear bomb testing was done in the area, born without heads or limbs, and only surviving for a few hours. This made me think about the current genocide in Palestine and the amount of babies born with birth defects in Gaza. One Palestinian journalist I follow online also spoke about how common it is for Palestinian refugees who seek asylum abroad to be diagnosed with high rates of cancer — most likely as a result of the exposure to pollutants, chemical warfare, and stress, among other things. All of this also made me think about how Greta Thunberg, an activist that was part of the recent Global Sumud Flotilla, and a known-environmentalist, was given a lot of media attention and uplifted by politicians who sought to co-opt her politics early on in her career as a young activist when she spoke out about climate change and global warming, but was defamed, discredited, and attacked for speaking up for Palestine. She has been quoted to say, “There can be no climate justice on occupied land. We are fighting against the same system that oppresses marginalised people, the same system that is destabilising the entire planet and biosphere, the very living conditions that we all depend on to survive.” I agree with her and think war and colonialism is an inherently environmental issue because of the destruction that’s wrought onto both the land and the people that live there, whether through immediate violence or “slow violence.”
One more thing that I found interesting from the lecture and the readings was the idea of “media ecology,” and how showing the impact of slow violence doesn’t really fit in with media, which creates a challenge for artists and activists to overcome in both visualizing the violence and also getting people to care. Nixon speaks a little bit about this at the end of his introduction when he also speaks about how living in a digital age where we’re constantly overwhelmed with information has lead to decreased attention spans. He also mentions the concept of ‘green capitalism,’ which isn’t actually making meaningful changes against environmental destruction. This idea of green capitalism and media ecology also reminds me of the difference in the way the media treated Greta Thunberg when she was “just” a climate activist vs. when she also started speaking out about Palestine. It seems that the media ecology not only favors “spectacular” violence over slow violence, but also a view on environmentalism that’s an isolated, abstract issue and not an intersectional one directly intertwined with the impacts of colonialism, genocide, war, and capitalism.
I think today’s lecture was extremely productive in naming/connecting the types of ecology, natural and media ecology. While also breaking down the prioritization of media containment and favoring of what to highlight. This is something that one often thinks about when seeing uncritical things often catch the attention of the media while coming across more important things that are rarely heard about such as the burning of electronics in Africa to retrieve the copper for money. If I hadn’t learned about this in today’s lecture, I likely would have never come across this topic on my own, which I’m really grateful to now be aware of. I think this class is also an amazing bridge between two types of ecology with of course a more catered audience being reached in comparison to a larger platform such as a news channel. But nonetheless a critical step in the right direction.
There’s so much I want to say about all the different examples of slow violence highlighted in the lecture today and the corresponding artworks – contemporary and non western works. Also the idea mentioned about environmental artists/activists work coming from an empty belly vs a full belly. That is something that was very enlightening, I‘d never really considered this. But learning about the example of the pseudo spokesperson who had made it on the bbc and took responsibility for all the harm caused to the people in India who were impacted by the chemical spill, offering $12 billion in support. At first I found it to be an inspiring example of environmental activism that held that company accountable and made it face the cruelty it had caused and evaded. While also causing a short-lived economic impact in the stock market for the company, but then also seeing the other side of how the people who were actually impacted might have felt that was heart breaking to think of. I can’t imagine suffering from an illness caused by this horrible spill or losing a loved one to it, then hearing about some sort of justice being offered but it just being a hoax. That likely caused the people impacted by the spill to have dual trauma from the actual spill and then the false hope of a solution. It was also an important example of how poor communities are often the ones who are often the victims of slow violence, hearing about Lawrence Summers’ take on dumping waste in countries/continents like Africa was very anger inducing… I don’t even have the words to speak on how wrong of a reality that is.
Kind of pivoting now but it makes me think of the use of algorithms in today’s age, we all have these personalized feeds that are cherry picked to our liking. So if you’re someone who pays attention to these issues you likely keep hearing about them/learning about them. But if you’re someone who usually scrolls past or doesn’t interact much, your algorithm will adjust accordingly. I think this can also create a gap in the important issues being communicated in terms of equal reach across communities. Although it can also be useful if you’re interested in learning about these issues. Everything is so personalized it makes me wonder how useful or unuseful this personalization is in terms of bridging natural/media ecology and combating lack of awareness about slow violence across the world. Hopefully this awareness through art communication can continue to grow and produce much needed solutions.
I currently work for the Parks Department, with my main station being just outside of a salt marsh. Most of the time, it simply looks like a pool of water. Some of the time, it looks like a muddy wasteland traversed by wandering ducks. I’ve only been able to visibly see the tide coming in or out once at the exact right moment. Had I not worked there, I would not have known the marsh cyclically flooded and drained every day. It is only through routine observation that I know this cycle.
I bring this up because I feel it mirrors the points made on slow violence. Most people only get a snapshot of a condition, or experience it so slowly that they have forgotten what it used to be like. We are seeing many catastrophic events starting to occur in “less developed” countries, such as the computer graveyard, or from my personal research, hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic clothing on shores. However, we have not seen the build up of these mounds of first world garbage. We see only an instance of what took decades to amass. It seems the inherent problem of slow violence is that its easier to miss if we’re not looking closely.
I find the art for this week particularly fascinating, and yet somehow lacking. None of the pieces (with the exception of Hell of Copper) moved me to see the timeline these events take place on. The article on visualizing environmental issues brings up an excellent point that things that take decades, or are invisible to the naked eye, often get ignored by people in favor of more in your face issues. Most of the art required background knowledge of particular issues, which is not a bad thing, but I think on the topic of slow violence, there is a unique opportunity to show a longer change in a single display. Perhaps a photograph each year of a single area that has slowly come overrun with computers, or a visual piece of the body degrading from radiation. I think art for this topic in particular has the deep ability to move, but i did not find myself quite moved by any piece without a description of what I was looking at. I think subltey in art goes a long way, but for something like this, a punchy piece might get the message across better.
We live in an era of information saturation, where the amount of content we consume daily has produced a kind of affective numbness. For something to get our attention, it must be spectacular, immediate, sensational, or amusing. Silly news like the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in D.C. turning green becomes the subject everyone talks about, while issues like the gradual degradation of a Nigerian community’s land and health stays in the unknown, why? because it doesn’t generate clicks or likes. This is what the artwork Hell of Copper makes visible, a landscape of American electronic trash dumped in Nigeria, not in secret, but in plain sight because the people absorbing the consequences have no money, no media coverage, and no political leverage to oppose it. The crime is committed in the open because nobody (powerful or important) cares. I wonder what happened after the photographs went public. Did the exposure stopped the problem or helped minimizing it?
What makes this possible is not just neglect but intentional scheming. Lawrence Summers’ memo proposing to export toxic waste to Africa, delivered calmly, shows the way people in power think. When entitlement is normalized, it doesn’t look like cruelty; it looks like efficiency. Someone with power decides that the best way to deal with the consequences of what wealthy countries do is to simply relegate and let the burden be carried by other nations that don’t have the same rights because they don’t produce as much wealth.
But entitlement and abuse can be stopped or at least alleviated if more regulations were enacted. Tech companies operate under minimal environmental regulations but receive a lot of financial support. We see it nowadays with AI. By holding big companies accountable for what they produce, they would have to plan for the waste and other negative consequences that come with it.
People who make these decisions rarely see themselves as perpetrators. Lawrence Summers probably fed himself with narratives about global balance, economic necessity, or the inevitable costs of progress. Narratives that justify him and avoid the guilt, but at the same time disconnect him from reality and his own humanity.
This lecture introduced the idea of slow violence, which was a new concept for me. Before watching the lecture, I usually thought of violence as something that happens suddenly, like a war, a shooting, or a natural disaster. The lecture explained that violence can also happen slowly over many years through pollution, disease, and environmental damage. I thought this was a powerful way to understand problems that are often ignored because they do not happen all at once.
One example that stood out to me was the discussion about heart disease. Even though it is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, it does not receive the same attention as sudden disasters. The lecture explained how unhealthy food, smoking, and limited access to healthy choices can slowly affect people’s health. I also found the discussion about forever chemicals in drinking water very concerning because many people may be exposed without even realizing it. These examples showed me that slow violence is often hidden in everyday life.
Another part of the lecture that interested me was the discussion of the Vietnam War and Agent Orange. I had learned about the war before, but I had never thought about the long-term effects of the chemicals that were used. The lecture explained that even after the fighting ended, many families continued to suffer from illness, birth defects, and environmental damage. This helped me understand that violence can continue long after the original event is over.
I also liked learning about how artists use their work to make slow violence visible. Since pollution and climate change happen over long periods of time, they can be difficult to see or understand. Artists create photographs, installations, and other projects that help people experience these issues in a more personal way. I think art can make people stop and think about problems that they might otherwise ignore.
One idea that stayed with me was that slow violence often affects poor communities the most. Many people do not have the resources to protect themselves from polluted water, toxic waste, or environmental damage. At the same time, these communities often receive the least attention in the media. This made me realize that environmental problems are also connected to fairness and inequality.
Overall, I thought this lecture was very informative. It changed the way I think about violence and showed me that some of the most serious problems in the world happen slowly over time. It also reminded me that art, education, and public awareness can help bring attention to issues that are easy to overlook. I will definitely think differently about environmental problems after watching this lecture.
My immediate thought was a delay agressive act. while watching the lecture, I began to realize that how much more impactful slow violence is compared to the for lack of better words immediate gratification of violence in general. The act of violence not only affects the world pollution standpoint, but also those who are in poverty. Slow violence is a strong, impactful downfall for people, depending on their economic status.
The specific work is from Nyaba Leon Quedraogo, Hell of Copper,2008. This specific work actually reminds me of a documentary from the mid-2000s called Wasteland. It’s about a Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz, who went back to a town in Brazil to photograph the landfills in a town near the capital. The base of the film features six different participants who actually worked in the landfill for a year. Vik Muniz and his six participants helped create different renditions of famous artwork, using recycled material from the landfill where they worked. And throughout the documentary, you started learning their history, their hardships, and their way of life. You begin to see how people were earning their wages and living as a result of the mass consumerism that the world has. This much waste people produce, and now other people are cleaning up after. Even though these are two different parts of the world and times, these artworks stand on the same thread of who gets impacted by slow violence the most. You see in both examples that they try to make a living to survive. In Wasteland, the garbage pickers sort throught mountains of trash to collect different things depending on the market. Similar to how there is a large economy of grabbing laced copper from the computer landfill like the piece “hell of copper”.
My thoughts on slow violence are that these bodies of work can help shine light on people who are heavily impacted by slow violence. How slow violence “created” these horrible, polluted living conditions. But I am impressed because the people living in these horrible circumstances were able to make a living to survive. On a broader scale of bringing visibility of slow violence, Bright Ugochuku, Acid Rain, 2009. This is also a very much in-your-face display of slow violence. What should be in clear water, but instead, there is a variety of dirty water and oil suspended in the air. This acts like rain. Just from this image alone, I feel like I could smell the acid rain.
Overall the lecture was very informative and gave a spotlight to, what is slow violence.