Slow Violence

Our sub-theme Slow Violence explores the long-term generational impacts of slow violence. Slow violence could be a form of social injustice or generational trauma that unfolds gradually, sometimes visible, often invisible, across time and space. This form of intergenerational (un)fairness we find in spaces (like a city, neighbourhood, borders, land, online spaces), ancestral narratives, digital ecosystems, bodies (the senses), or language.

The title of this theme is inspired by the publication “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor” by Rob Nixon. While Nixon originally framed slow violence in relation to environmentalism, these student projects extend the concept beyond environmental harm to address a broader landscape of inherited injustice. In doing so, they also imagine alternative spaces of resistance, kinship and care.

We have invited students to explore how such slow violence plays out across generations. The works presented by the students investigate how intergenerational (un)fairness takes shape through the stubborn sprout of a weed, the quiet choreography of domestic care or the bureaucratic language of migration policy. Working across mediums including film, installation, participatory performance and poetic documentary, these works bring to light the often-invisible structures that shape our relationships with nature, with each other, with institutions and with borders. United by the concept of intergenerational fairness, they ask what is passed down (consciously or not) and how future worlds might be made more equitable by acknowledging, resisting or reimagining inherited systems.