POSSIBLE LANDSCAPES

Directed by Kannan Arunasalam

Produced and conceptualized by Tao DuFour and Natalie Melas

"For no one had yet written of this landscape

that it was possible.”

Derek Walcott

A collaboration between a documentary filmmaker, Kanan Arunasalam and two professors, Tao DuFour (Architecture) a spatial theorist and Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature) a postcolonial comparatist and scholar of Caribbean thought, Possible Landscapes is the outcome of the team research project, “Possible Landscapes: Documenting Environmental Experience in Trinidad and Tobago,” funded through the Cornell Migrations Initiative team research grant for the Mellon Just Futures Initiative. The aim was to develop methods of field research and representation in documentary film that foreground intergenerational lived experience of landscapes and environments in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and to query the formation of environmental and climate imaginaries, with a view to getting at larger historical questions—of migration, plantation societies, extractivism, race, and the legacies of colonialism—that inform everyday practices in ways that are difficult to identify and to articulate, because they are concretely lived.

Possible Landscapes joins seven people in seven different regions of the islands in the course of their daily lives: Kevin, a fisherman on the east coast suffering the recent loss of one of his crew members at sea; four generations of the Josephs family in the steep hillsides of the northern range; Captain ‘Spaceman’ Philips and his glass-bottomed boat in Tobago from which he has witnessed the decline of the coral reefs; Crystal, a trade unionist active in supporting workers who lost their jobs when a major oil refinery was closed; Romulas, known as the “last sugar cane farmer” in the central plains and his Venezuelan workers; Stephanie a nurse who worked in the oil fields in the south starting just after World War II; Tony, originally from Jamaica, a climate change analyst, agriculturalist and rabbit farmer in St Joseph.

Co-sponsored with The College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office, The Society for the Humanities, Africana Studies and Research Center, Department of Architecture, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Literatures in English, Environment and Sustainability, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Department of Romance Studies

Possible Landscapes is supported by a grant from Cornell University’s Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.

All events are free and open to the public.

If you need accommodations to participate, please contact icm@cornell.edu as soon as possible.