Weibel Lectures
Joshua Neves
– Metabolic Mediations: Documenting the Long Opioid Crisis
Weibel Lectures - Joshua Neves - Metabolic Mediations: Documenting the Long
Opioid Crisis
Peter Weibel-Forschungsinstitut für digitale Kulturen
Peter Weibel-Forschungsinstitut für digitale Kulturen
We keep the wrong
things private and it’s destroying us, says photographer and activist Nan Goldin in the final moments of the 2022 documentary
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras). Indeed Goldin’s own documentary preoccupations – what she describes
as a kind of record keeping that counters the violence of collective memory – ground the film’s ethical and political address.
This includes a narrative arc that combines the artist’s personal histories
and trauma with the private and public horrors of the opioid epidemic, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic before it, as well as public
actions against the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is just the most high-profile
example among dozens of documentary and docudramatic mediations of the big pharma-led crisis, including artworks, feature
docs, scripted series, and actuality footage streamed and shared across platforms. What these project’s share is an insistence
on capturing the unheeded aspects of late industrialism and of fostering a kind of memory care based in personal and popular
record-making. But these present concerns and mediations also have a history. Placing these issues in dialogue with debates
about data, evidentiary aesthetics, and the ‘metabolic rift,’ this talk considers the present opioid crisis in the context
of a longer history of chemical empire.
Joshua Neves is Associate Professor of Film Studies and
Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University. He is co-author (with Aleena Chia, Susanna Paasonen,
and Ravi Sundaram) of Technopharmacology (Minnesota University Press / Meson Press, 2022), author of Underglobalization:
Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, March 2020), and co-editor (with Bhaskar
Sarkar) of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017). His work is published
in Media Theory, Cultural Critique, Social Text, Discourse, Culture Machine, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Sarai, The
Routledge Companion to Risk and Media, among others.
Zoom: https://dieangewandte-at.zoom.us/j/68263727455
