Work-in-Progress Talk by Tom Vickery (PhD researcher, University of Leeds)
Animism, Film and the Mangrove: Reading ‘Luta Ca Caba Inda’ through Film as an Animist Medium
January 23, 2026 | 15:00
NOVA FCSH, Av. de Berna – Room B211 (2nd floor, Tower B)
Session in English
Since the turn of the 21st century, the study of animism in academic institutions has experienced a revitalised vigour. Moving on from its modern framing as a form of religious belief, anthropology, art history and film studies have looked at animism relationally. Animism is now more willingly conceived as a condition of consciousness that perceives referential and agentic persons, existing as a mutually compounding field of relation beyond the individual human subject. This work-in-progress paper will follow these developments to read film, through Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César’s ‘Skola di Tarafe’ (Magrove School) (2022), as a specifically animist medium. In an essay on animist cinema, César speaks directly to the potential of the medium in understanding animism as a condition of relationality: ‘the animist coding of matter is … a force of existence that operates humanity beyond the body and is, therefore, not colonizable matter, not reachable to the oppressors.’ This paper will unpack César’s interaction with the concept, reading animist film as a distinctly eco-critical framework, uniquely positioned to welcome conviviality with larger-than-human subjectivities and consider alternatives for thinking-with-the-world.
The talk concludes a month in Lisbon as a Visiting Researcher within the Contemporary Art Studies Research Group of the Art History Institute, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, under the supervision of Ana Balona de Oliveira.
