Description
This project broadly explores embodied histories of war, displacement, and trauma in Central Africa through the natural landscape that grounds them. The paper central argument suggests that exploring wartime trauma as embodied within nature and alongside communities offer key insights into the wounded landscape of war and its collective legacies. While there is growing scholarship on nature as injured by war – which this work enters in dialogue with – this project centres on nature as the visual landscape of community’s trauma in war. Specifically, it considers environmental spaces as avenues through which the trauma of wartime continues to be collectively experienced. The paper utilises an interdisciplinary methodological approach relying on body maps and short films produced in the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo. The resulting visual histories highlight natural spaces of trauma as existing alongside, and embodied within, communities in war. Via this frame, I interrogate the ways in which war transform natural landscapes and the environment more broadly.
