Feral Violence in "Acid Forest": The "Anthropo(s)cene" and its Media

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 MATEUSZ BOROWSKI Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media This paper draws on the concept of feral violence as backdrop for disucussing Rugile Bardziukaitė and Dovydas Korba’s observational documentary Acid Forest (2018), depicting the cormorant bird colony on the Curonian Spit (at Juodkrantė), a hundred-kilometre-long sand-dune peninsula shared by Lithuania and Russia that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. In this context I introduce the concept of the Anthropo(s)cene – a specific network of multispecies relations that arise in human-modified landscapes. This notion, contrasted with a more established concept of environment, helps demonstrate how specific forms of representation question the rationale for excluding beings deemed feral from larger multispecies networks, while also opening up spaces for attending to the well-being of more encompassing networks of multispecies life. Anthropocene Anthropo(s)cene Wildlife Management Feral Violence Coordinations Mateusz Borowski Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 Feral Violence In the current age of profound and lasting ecological disturbances, a host of biologic, geologic and climatic phenomena challenge the regulatory capacities of technoscientific regimes of modernity. These phenomena, which often seem unexpected, unprecedented and out of season, are commonly explained as manifestations of a much deeper and profound disturbance to the Earth’s ecology. For this reason, the current epoch, called the Anthropocene among other names, challenges the epistemological regime of modernity – scientific methodologies and procedures of knowledge-making, as well as our capacity to imagine other, liveable ways of life. As the authors of the Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene (2024) argue, what typifies the current era of generalised crises is the emergence of a new nature – one that is entangled, at every scale, with infrastructures created by humans. And, characteristically, the lifeforms emerging from this entanglement are feral – “transformed by human infrastructure” or appearing in reaction to it, they are “not under the control of human designers”.1 Neither wild nor domesticated, taking advantage of what has been left in the wake of modernisation projects that provided grounds for the concept and practices of biopolitics, these feral beings gain the power to critically influence the arrangements created for humans’ sake. Feral phenomena arise at the moment of rupture in the temporal co-ordinations sustaining multispecies life, and since they result from the entanglements of numerous biological and cultural factors operating at various scales, they require multidisciplinary and multimodal methods of description and research – methods that can account for the fundamental openness and indeterminacy of feral forms of life. The authors of Field Guide imply that studying and understanding those feral proliferations may prove crucial for the survival of humans and other species in the face of conditions increasingly hostile to their long-term permanence. Defined in such a way, ferality can be said to result from what Karen Barad – in a text published in 2012, twelve years before Field Guide – calls “nature’s queer performativity”.2 Admittedly, as she argues, the notion of performativity has until recently been treated as a purely human capacity.3 Barad thus makes a case for recognising the agency of non-humans who – like ferality in its undermining of the binary of wild and domestic – queer the distinctions created by humans for the sake of upholding the view of pristine nature in need of human stewardship. This stewardship often takes the form of violent acts against beings who straddle the border between the binary of wild and domestic, subverting it at the same time. However, as she argues, it is crucial to understand how humans and non-humans depend on each other to create ecologies in which they can flourish and live despite the growing ecological disturbance. To this end “what is needed is an account […] of all matter(ings)/materializations, including the materializing effects of boundary making practices”.4 These are practices which aim to introduce and stabilise binary oppositions between humans and non-humans, as well as between Mateusz Borowski Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 natural and social forces. Therefore, at stake in recognising the performativity of non-humans is not only the undermining of human exceptionalism, but primarily the ability to “think about the nature of causality, agency, relationality, and change without taking those distinctions to be foundational or holding them in place”.5 In the context of the current environmental polycrisis, recognising the performativity of non-humans offers a way of understanding the agency of feral phenomena as intrinsically relational – entangled with human-made infrastructures and other biotic and abiotic beings. Equally significant is that such an approach emphasises the complex causality of ferality as an emergent, unforeseen effect of failed attempts at subjugating and controlling the lifeworlds of non-humans, unaccounted for in the desires and plans of the human designers of infrastructures. Thinking about ferality in performative terms emphasises the complex causality of the current ecological predicaments. Also, the performative lens may help us bring out the materialising effects of boundary-making practices that Barad writes about. In other words, it may be useful to demonstrate that new concepts, as Elizabeth A. Povinelli puts it, can be “understood as action in the world”:6 they not only name unprecedented environmental phenomena typical of our age, but also suggest specific courses of action, management methods and survival strategies. The notion of ferality is a very good example of such a semiotic-material knot, which provides a framework for comprehending an emergent phenomenon and makes it easier to manage. To call a being feral is, after all, a double-edged sword. While it accurately describes the changes currently occurring in ecosystems, ferality also sanctions “biophobic visions of environmental catastrophe”7 attributed to living beings perceived as threats to human arrangements. Feral beings – such as plagues, pests or invasives species, examples of which abound in Field Guide – very often stand in conflict with human interests, endangering their well-being, social arrangements and economic activities, precisely because they thrive in ecosystems disrupted by human activity. They therefore provoke various biopolitical schemes, which often fail to reach their aim or even exacerbate the situation. This demonstrates the fundamental insufficiency of specialised scientific disciplines in dealing with feral phenomena, particularly salient in regulatory schemes aimed at conserving existing ecological arrangements and, avowedly, defending ecosystems from the intrusion of feral species. In the following, I trace the relationship between violence against feral beings and the conceptualisations of environment which put humans at its center. In line with the performative approach to ferality, I conceive of any conceptualisations as material, situated practices involving various medial apparatuses that provide access to the lifeworlds of non-human others. As Eva Haifa Giraud extensively argues, we need to think more carefully about the way in which we depict the lifeworlds of non-human others, particularly those sacrificed for the survival of a larger collective.8 The stakes in making visible the complexity of “material-semiotic relations that lie behind particular modes Mateusz Borowski Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 of representation”9 are quite high. By depicting the “more-than-human composition of environments”,10 we can question such conceptualisations of nature that prioritise the colonial human gaze. In this way, it is possible to “open space to ask whether things could be otherwise.”11 Although I agree with Haifa Giraud’s call for a more nuanced representation of exclusion, I would like to suggest that the notion of the environment itself also needs to be challenged. If feral beings emerge out of the entanglements of the natural and the social – a hallmark of the Anthropocene – then it might be necessary to think about these entanglements as comprising not only biotic beings, but also human infrastructures and the material traces of anthropogenic catastrophes. In an attempt to entertain the possibility of such a conceptual shift, I here introduce the term Anthropo(s)cene as an alternative to the notion of the environment. An Anthropo(s)cene can be defined as a specific network of multispecies relations that arise in human-modified landscapes, a network which becomes a performative effect through the way these relations are observed via various medial dispositifs. Thus, the Anthropo(s)cenedoes not represent pristine nature as an object of study and conquest for the human subject. Rather, it decentres human subjects by placing them within multispecies relations and emphasises the interplay of various affordances of biotic and abiotic elements within human-made infrastructures – an interplay occurring at non-human temporal and spatial scales. In other words, thinking about the Anthropo(s)cene rather than the environment shifts attention to the performativity of non-humans that Barad wrote about. To illustrate how the concept of the Anthropo(s)cene might be mobilised, in this paper, I examine a single work that employs the medium of a film to provide insight into multispecies relations across different scales, revealing how they shape conditions for liveability and survival at a specific spot. The spot in question focuses on the cormorant bird colony on the Curonian Spit (at Juodkrantė), a hundred-kilometre-long sand-dune peninsula shared by Lithuania and Russia that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. This filmic work, Acid Forest (2018), directed by the Lithuanian film and performance artist Rugilė Bardžiukaitė in cooperation with Dovydas Korba, critically examines the violent management of the colony, showing how it is carried out in the name of protecting human interests. To capture the relationship between the way humans look at the colony and the way they eradicate it, Bardziukaitė and Korba created a particular filming dispositif – an arrangement of mounting cameras in a variety of static positions (on the ground; high in the trees; on a beach across the lagoon), as well as on a drone flying high above the forest (when this shot appears on the screen it is accompanied by the sound of fluttering wings, suggesting we watch the ground from a bird’s perspective). However, the film composed of the material gathered in this way is not a typical nature documentary. Usually, these wellestablished formats for bringing biological knowledge closer to lay viewers feature an overarching narrative commentary from the outset and the voices of specialists providing expert knowledge. Acid Forest lacks such a dominant Mateusz Borowski Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 narrative. Instead, it provides multiple viewpoints of the colony, from wide shots to close-ups, thus creating the effect of visual access to different spatial and temporal scales via a medial apparatus. Consequently, the film acquires an explicitly performative character, not only by engaging the viewers’ attention but also by thematising the very act of making sense of a landscape transformed by the birds. In other words, its medial dispositif shows the cormorant colony through the non-human eyes of the cameras, capturing how the multispecies network performs together to create conditions of liveability for several beings. FIG. 1 Rugile Bardziukaitė in collaboration with Dovydas Korba, Acid Forest , 2018, film still. The question is, however, whether the cormorant colony on the Curonian Spit can be regarded as an instance of ferality. After all, the birds reappeared there in late 198912 after many decades of absence caused by environmental pollution and methodical eradication by humans, who have traditionally considered the species a pest. Undoubtedly, they are survivors of several human-induced ecological catastrophes. The massive extinction of cormorants in the mid-20thcentury across Europe (particularly around the Baltic Sea), Asia and North America, was caused by two conjoined factors. On the one hand, the widespread use of DDT and pesticides negatively affected reproductive capacities of fish-eating wildlife species, cormorants included.13 On the other hand, cormorants were eradicated as pests that threatened fisheries and the fishing industry.14 The withdrawal of DTT and other toxic substances, along with granting protection to the species in the 1970s, created conditions favourable for the resurgence of cormorants. Moreover, it turned out that cormorants had recovered quicker from insecticide poisoning than their avian predators – bald eagles, vultures and gulls – thus gaining a temporary advantage which allowed them to thrive.15 Admittedly, the birds’ return to their former habitats is not a typical instance of ferality, understood as an effect of ecological disturbance. However, the cormorant’s fate over the last hundred Mateusz Borowski Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 years has been determined by human-induced catastrophes and their lasting effects on ecosystems. What is more, their resurgence has been regarded as a major intrusion into ecosystems, leading authorities not only to implement conservation measures to control the bird population, but also to consider partially lifting the species’ legal protection.16 Thus cormorants can be considered feral in the sense in which Fiona Probyn-Rapsey and Rowena Lennox employ the term, drawing attention to its two interrelated meanings. The adjective feral not only applies to species that are deemed unruly and cannot be controlled by humans, but also to beings “of a deadly nature” or “fatal”.17 In the case of the colony on the Curonian Spit, the violence against the birds has been justified with reference to their assumed catastrophic effect on the extant wildlife, threatening human interests, primarily the fisheries. Already in 2002, the authors of a publication in Acta Zoologica Lithuanica – a journal by the Institute of Ecology at Vilnius University – drew attention to the rapid expansion of the species, predicting that it will “cause a conflict with fisheries”.18 And indeed, in the second decade of the 21st century, management of the colony was implemented by the “scaring of breeding birds in late stages of incubation”,19 considerably diminishing the number of birds. Still, as the recent study has shown, the presence of cormorants has had a significant impact not only on aquatic life, but also on small mammals inhabiting the colony. This is because the birds transfer biogenic nutrients from the water onto the land, substances which “reach small mammals through the trophic cascade, thus influencing the nutrient balance in the terrestrial ecosystem”.20 Consequently, a recent study concerning the colony on the Curonian Spit found “poorer body conditions of the most abundant species”21 in the nesting zone. In other words, scientific research suggests that the colony has become a typical hotspot, “a place-time knot where ‘something is broken’”22 and cannot go back to its previous state on its own, before the resurgence of the birds. It therefore requires conservation and management. Bardziukaitė’s film does not directly refer to this ecological research; rather, it centres human ways of observing and knowing the landscape altered by cormorants. In the following, I analyse Acid Forest to demonstrate how it questions the premises that justify the decision to perpetrate feral violence. However, before doing so, I return the concept of the Anthropo(s)cene to explore how it captures the relationship between the medial representation of feral life and the practices of managing it. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate how specific forms of representation question the rationale for excluding beings deemed feral from larger multispecies networks. Thinking Matterphorically about the Anthropo(s)cene In an earlier publication, Anna Tsing and her colleagues argued that “the Anthropocene is a wake-up call urging us to reinvent observational, analytical attention to intertwined human-and-nonhuman histories”.23 Considering that feral forms of life are particularly prone to violent eradication, it is crucial to Mateusz Borowski Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 draw attention to another aspect of these narrative and visual depictions of landscapes altered by human activity: how an account of a given landscape has been created and what has been left outside of the frame in order for a story or an image to be understood as representing a feral phenomenon. In other words, to understand why violent regulatory measures are implemented, it is necessary to examine ways of representing ferality within wider multispecies networks, across vast stretches of time. This is where the notion of the Anthropo(s)cene fits in. To clarify how I use the term Anthropo(s)cene for the purposes of this paper, I would like to draw on an image which recurs in Acid Forest as a central leitmotif. The eponymous acid forest itself is a widening stretch of pinewood that keeps dying ever since it came to be inhabited by a returning and growing population of cormorants. The birds, nesting on treetops, drop their excrement in such quantities that, due to the heightened acidity of the soil, the pines wither and fall, creating a landscape that evokes associations with major ecological catastrophes. Many local inhabitants, as well as fishermen and foresters, consider this particular stretch of the forest shown in the film a black (or rather grey) spot in a pristine green national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Many of the film’s shots feature a wooden observational platform mounted just off a busy walking trail on the Curonian Spit. The structure, built upon a 52-metre-high sand dune, provides a vantage point over the edge of the colony – a group of dried trees with birds perching on top of them. The film is composed of scenes featuring different groups of visitors – mostly tourists from abroad, some accompanied by local guides – who climb the platform and try to make sense of the view in front of them. What stands out clearly is that the acid forest becomes a backdrop onto which the humans project their fragmentary knowledge, inseparable from superstitions, prejudices and negative attitudes towards the birds, commonly considered ugly and aggressive. Some even propose their own solutions to the problem, including just shooting the birds – easy targets on bare trees. Speaking in different languages, they discuss among themselves what they see, share snippets of information gathered beforehand about the site or just reveal the scope of their ignorance. Clearly, in Acid Forest it is not solely cormorants that the cameras focus on, but humans too in equal measure; they take centre stage on the platform, on which the act of looking, perceiving and comprehending the surrounding landscape shifts to the foreground. As a result, the film examines the relationship of humans to this species of birds, demonstrating how ways of seeing are related to acts of feral violence masked as wildlife management. Mateusz Borowski Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 FIG. 2 Rugile Bardziukaitė in collaboration with Dovydas Korba, Acid Forest , 2018, film still. By juxtaposing various viewpoints on the stretch of forest inhabited by cormorants, Acid Forest displaces the authority of science often present in nature documentaries through the overarching narrative commentary from the outset and through the voices of specialists providing expert knowledge. The film lacks a dominant voiceover, and the only scholar, Jūratė Zarankaitė, appears towards the end of the Acid Forest as one of the last visitors, filmed on the platform by a television crew. A professional ecologist, Zarankaitė – one of the authors of the aforementioned publication from Acta Zoologica Lithuanica – provides a scientific explanation of the phenomenon of the re-emergence of cormorants on the Curonian Spit, together with all the gathered data concerning the number of birds and their yearly rate of hatching. As she says, although the return of cormorants was first noted two decades before the film was shot, the birds had inhabited this region for centuries prior to their extinction, and their revival is an occurrence that cannot be easily assessed in terms of damage to the local ecosystem. As the naturalist reminds the viewers, it is a natural and multifaceted ecological phenomenon. Populations of different species inhabiting the same area depend on each other and the destruction of one might be beneficial or detrimental to others, affecting the entire ecosystem. However, the ambiguity about the cormorants’ impact on the national park does not prevent the authorities from introducing typically human-centric regulatory measures to reduce the number of birds – measures which the viewers can see in the final section of Acid Forest. A forester sets up fireworks around the colony to scare the birds off so that they leave their eggs to cool; as a result, the embryos die. Such an ending succinctly brings home to viewers that the decision to intervene in the bird colony’s life was made despite a great degree of scientific uncertainty about the extent of damage the cormorants had done to the local ecosystem. In this way, Bardziukaitė clearly shows that the voices of lay people expressing their negative attitudes prevail over scientific research, while management of the species is based on limited knowledge and prejudice. Mateusz Borowski Feral Violence in “Acid Forest”: The “Anthropo(s)cene” and its Media INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 The recurring image of people looking at the colony from a safe distance encapsulates the relationship between humans and non-human lifeworlds as implied in the notion of environment, commonly used to describe the natural world as influenced by human activity.24 As Michel Serres reminds us in his Natural Contract, the very word environment, and particularly its French equivalent l’environment, puts humans at the centre of the system of nature.25 After all, the root of this word is the French adverb environ, meaning ‘around.’ The environment, as watched from the wooden platform, is therefore that which is around us – humans – who stand in the centre of the world; in Serres’ words, at “the exact midpoint or excellent culmination of all things”.26 In Acid Forest, the visitors mount the platform to look at nature and make sense of it, revealing their claim to mastery over the worlds of non-humans. Therefore, this image materialises the specific anthropocentric concept of nature and captures the roots of feral violence in a matterphorical way – a term introduced by Daniela Gandorfer and Zulaikha Ayub. Making a case for thinking about concepts as deeply material and performative, they define matterphorics as a “heightened attentiveness to the violence(s) already inherent in representational modes of thought and sense-making”.27 This central image of Acid Forest described above – the scenes on the observational platform – matter-forth the human relationship with the lifeworlds of other beings, as implied in the term environment. Therefore, even if Acid Forest is an observational nature documentary, it is a peculiar one. Its main protagonist is not nature itself, but rather humans in their relation to other species and their lifeworlds – in this case, predominantly the colony of cormorants on the Curonian Spit. FIG. 3 Rugile Bardziukaitė in collaboration with Dovydas Korba, Acid Forest , 2018, film still. The platform, a specific kind of viewing technology, contrasts with the second viewing apparatus employed to capture the acid forest. Whilst the tourists see the acid forest as an environment, Bardziukaitė offers the audience of her film