Description
This paper experiments with forms of reading/writing the city through its elemental poetics. It attempts to ask what an elemental political ecology of city might feel or look like. Drawing on several independent films of the Middle East and North Africa such as The Dam (Al-Sadd, Sudan, 2022), Taste of Cement (Lebanon, 2017), The Last Days of the City (Egypt, 2016), the paper traces how these renditions employ the elemental geographies (earth, water, fire, air, dust, cement…etc.) of the urban in approaching their city as aesthetic subjects amongst revolutionary flux. Through developing the notion of the “elemental poetics of the urban”, my aim is two-fold: first, I want to reflect on the material, affective, and aesthetic entanglements that make up the city as an aesthetic subject admits a revolution. Second, I want to approach the city through its elemental geographies (Englemann and McCormack 2021) to probe its political ecologies. My suggestion here is that these poetics disinvest from foregrounding a resisting subject (or what might we expect a resistant subject to look like) without giving up on the city as a revolutionary geography.
