Ecotheories Colloquium: “Ecology/Echography: Heidegger’s Hut–Three Displacements”

“Ecology/Echography: Heidegger’s Hut—Three Displacements,” explores Martin Heidegger’s iconic hutte in the Black Forest, to which many famous writers and thinkers have made pilgrimage, as an enframing technology and a spectral inscription—a kind of echo chamber—through which to explore the relationship between philosophy, ecology, technology, and violence. Our first = displacement will involve the storied visit to the hut by the poet Paul Celan and the poem he wrote about his visit. Our second displacement reframes Heidegger’s hut in the context of the project Two Cabins by artist and experimental film-maker James Benning, who built replicas of the huts of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond and Theodore Kaczynski (aka “the Unabomber”) in Stemple Pass, Montana, and then branched out from there to a series of films and multimedia installations exploring the relationship between technology, violence, justice, and the natural world. From there, we land on our third displacement: a clear-cut site in the mountains of Colorado, where we continue to explore what “dwelling” properly means in the context of our responsibility to the non-human world and the clash of values we find around “nature” in the American West.