Watching, Witnessing, Resisting

I'm developing this memo based on a reading of Sam Spiegel's 2021 article Fossil fuel violence and visual practices on Indigenous land: Watching, witnessing and resisting settler-colonial injustices. The article extends from ethnographic research around environmental activism against two pipeline projects on indigeneous lands in British Columba, CA: 1) Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX), carrying heavy oil (bitumen) and 2) Coastal Gaslink pipeline, carrying fracked gas. The article provides a framework to study the visual practices and tactices enaged in by the state, fossil fuel companies, and environmental defenders. The author also selects and discusses 12 visuals that focus particularly on visual practices and images of fossil fuel opposition, including photos, posters, and artworks, such as courtroom drawings. Notably, the analysis is organized around different periods of the anti-pipeline struggles (before the research, in response to police raids, and COVID-19 pandemic).

Spiegel distinguishes between the petro-state’s visual tactics and counter-hegemonic visual practices:

A) Petro-state visual tactics:

1. promote a misleading utopian vision of settler-colonial extractivism
2. invisibilize what the fossil fuel industry wishes not to be seen, and
3. visibilise an image of land defenders aimed at undermining legitimacy, while all the while
4. intensifying surveillance of those who oppose its settler-colonial values for ‘development’, and
5. concurrently distracting the public from social concerns with optical allyship and technological solutions

B) Counter-hegemonic visuality

1. using a myriad of creative artistic modalities to depict alternative visions of human and non-human interactions
2. (counter)watching to monitor the ongoing environmental, health, safety and rights transgressions
3. witnessing fossil fuel violence on land and in the courtroom, and iv) widely disseminating these visual manifestations