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
