Description:

Irreclaimable: Desert(ed) Lives and Labor Time in Post-Socialist Central Asia
Followed by a virtual Q&A with filmmaker Zhou Hao

RSVP 
 

In the environmental science of arid and semi-arid regions, reclamation generally refers to a form of conquest that rehabilitates drylands from a state of degradation to enhance extractable value and remediate loss. Juxtaposing two films set in the nearly-vanished Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and the expanding Tengger Desert in northwest China, this program probes how the aftermath of state-engineered ruination and abandonment is lived, and how the future means to those enlisted in a project of perpetual reclamation, or impossible conquest.

ARAL. FISHING IN AN INVISIBLE SEA (dir. Saodat Ismailova and Carlos Casas, 2004) documents the everyday labor of survival of three generations of Uzbek fishermen, whose traditional subsistence economy and way of life have been progressively destroyed by the ecosystem collapse triggered by the Soviet-era diversion of the saltwater lake’s feeder rivers for agricultural development. BEFORE SANDSTORM (dir. Zhou Hao, 2023) follows a group of elderly migrant day laborers as they banter through the Sisyphean toil of planting sand barriers made with dry straw on seemingly endless dunes as part of China’s multi-decade campaign against desertification. Eschewing grand narratives of anthropogenic environmental catastrophe and reclamation in post-socialist Central Asia, the films offer intimate insights into the existential and material conditions of life on the frontline, ordained as much by past, present, and imminent events of destruction as they are by the work of the day.

Films include:

ARAL. FISHING IN AN INVISIBLE SEA (Saodat Ismailova and Carlos Casas, 2004, 53min, Digital)

BEFORE SANDSTORM (Zhou Hao, 2023, 30min, Digital)

Total run time: 83 min

The screening will be followed by an online Q&A with the filmmaker Zhou Hao.

Programmed by Kang Kang (Comparative Literary Studies) of the Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

This screening is supported by the Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and co-presented with the Reclamation Symposium of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.