Jacob von Heland
I am Research Fellow at the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory and the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment. Previously I have worked in film production (2011-2016) and held researcher positions at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, SEI-Asia, Bangkok, Dept of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
I am interested in commons, historical ecologies, political philosophy, STS, montage and interventionist filmmaking. I have worked in Eastern Africa, Southern Africa and Madagascar since 2005.
I lead "Towards a Visual Environmental Humanities in the Digital Era" with Co-I Henrik Ernstson at the Univ of Manchester. The project combines postcolonial studies and filmic research with projects in Cape Town and Durban. This research also addresses historical difficulties of the academy to institutionalise film and visual registers as part of its knowledge dissemination.
The film One Table Two Elephants (84 min) had world premiere in competition at CPH:DOX 2018.
Projects:
2018 - Curator and Co-founder Crosscuts Stockholm Environmental Humanities Festival for Film and Text, together with M. Christensen, M. Armiero and S. Jonsson, funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS.
2017- Principal Investigator (PI) for Towards a Visual Environmental Humanities: A bimodal research practice in the digital era
2015-17 Principal Investigator (PI) for Ways of Knowing Urban Nature- the Film (Co-I Henrik Ernstson) funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas.
Courses and lectures 2017-2018 (graduate level):
i) The visual environmental humanities
ii) Ciné-ethnography and multiple ciné-eyes
iii) Filmmaking as academic research practice beyond discipline/mode
iv) Provincializing Malfeasance
Supervisors: PhD supervisors (2007-2011) Carl Folke, Thomas Elmqvist, Sverker Sörlin and Film mentors: Tom Alandh, Kalle Boman
Address: Jacob von Heland
Växthuset
Fredriksro
134 32 Gustavsberg
Environmental humanities and the moving image
Environmental Humanities Lab
Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment
Department of Philosophy and History
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Teknikringen 74D plan 5
114 28 Stockholm, Sweden
[email protected]
+46707272487
I am interested in commons, historical ecologies, political philosophy, STS, montage and interventionist filmmaking. I have worked in Eastern Africa, Southern Africa and Madagascar since 2005.
I lead "Towards a Visual Environmental Humanities in the Digital Era" with Co-I Henrik Ernstson at the Univ of Manchester. The project combines postcolonial studies and filmic research with projects in Cape Town and Durban. This research also addresses historical difficulties of the academy to institutionalise film and visual registers as part of its knowledge dissemination.
The film One Table Two Elephants (84 min) had world premiere in competition at CPH:DOX 2018.
Projects:
2018 - Curator and Co-founder Crosscuts Stockholm Environmental Humanities Festival for Film and Text, together with M. Christensen, M. Armiero and S. Jonsson, funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS.
2017- Principal Investigator (PI) for Towards a Visual Environmental Humanities: A bimodal research practice in the digital era
2015-17 Principal Investigator (PI) for Ways of Knowing Urban Nature- the Film (Co-I Henrik Ernstson) funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas.
Courses and lectures 2017-2018 (graduate level):
i) The visual environmental humanities
ii) Ciné-ethnography and multiple ciné-eyes
iii) Filmmaking as academic research practice beyond discipline/mode
iv) Provincializing Malfeasance
Supervisors: PhD supervisors (2007-2011) Carl Folke, Thomas Elmqvist, Sverker Sörlin and Film mentors: Tom Alandh, Kalle Boman
Address: Jacob von Heland
Växthuset
Fredriksro
134 32 Gustavsberg
Environmental humanities and the moving image
Environmental Humanities Lab
Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment
Department of Philosophy and History
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Teknikringen 74D plan 5
114 28 Stockholm, Sweden
[email protected]
+46707272487
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Papers by Jacob von Heland
Situated and grounded in lived experiences across a range of groups, this film follows different ways of knowing and tries to be a vehicle toward difficult yet urgently needed conversations about how race, nature and the city are intertwined in our postcolonial world where history is ever present in subtle and direct ways.
This ‘cinematic ethnography’ is directed towards a wide audience, from the general public, to students and scholars, as it brings texture to understand a city like Cape Town, while providing ample possibilities to translate what is happening “there” to conversations about other cities and surroundings. It is based on years of research in Cape Town and was filmed in 2015 as part of a longer-term research and film-project on ontological politics and urban political ecology.
The film had its World Premiere on 20 March 2018 at CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Film Festival (cinema Dagmar) and was nominated to the DOX:Nordic Award. During 2016 and 2017, a shorter First Cut version (47 minutes) was screened at several universities and cities in the world with feedback becoming part of the editing process, including Durban, Windhoek, Stellenbosch, Grahamstown, New York, Palo Alto, Rome, Munich, Trier, and Stockholm. The film will have its world premiere in 2018.
Created by: Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson. Photography: Johan von Reybekiel. Sound: Jonathan Chiles. Sound mixing: Jakob Oldenburg. Music: Louise Becker. Additional music: Dave Reynolds and Pops Mohammed. Production coordination: Jessica Rattle and Nceba Mangese. Graphic design Erik Hartin. Editing: Jacob von Heland. Assistant editing: Henrik Ernstson. Research: Henrik Ernstson & Jacob von Heland. Produced by: Telltales Film in collaboration with The Situated Ecologies Platform and KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Funded by: Swedish Research Council Formas with support from the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.
Scholarly reference:
Von Heland, Jacob, and Henrik Ernstson (2018) One Table Two Elephants (84 minutes, cinematic ethnography, film, Color, HD, Dolby 5:1). World Premiere In Competition at CPH:DOX March 20, 2018. The Situated Ecologies Platform (CC-BY-NC): Stockholm. Stable URL (Open Access): https://vimeo.com/298166514.
Official trailer: http://bit.ly/1T2Ewatch
Stream the FULL FILM (and find resources on how to teach with the film): http://www.situatedecologies.net/teaching-resources/one-table-two-elephants/teaching-the-film-one-table-two-elephants/
Several characters come and go in front of the camera. Some of them, young kids, are equipped with machetes that start hacking us to pieces, felling us there and then. Others are equipped with seemingly less dangerous tools, a clipboard and a camera, and they scribble notes about us on pieces of paper, which in turn gets plugged into a computer database; a hand moves a computer mouse to register the scale of our existence and the GPS coordinates of where exactly we live and thrive. Yet others (not shown in the current short clip) use silence-wrecking chainsaws making the pain pitching high, but short. While we, the unwanted plants—deemed the ultimate foreigner and alien—are certainly placed in the category of waste, as useless, we also witness, as we are chopped down, the coherence we bring to a project of keeping the inside of a postcolonial state calm and organised. We, the aliens, provide the purpose and fetish of “rainbowed” unification.
As Bonnie Honig (2001) but also Jean and John Comaroff (2001) have pointedly analyzed, aliens perform an important productive role for liberal democracy and the postcolony to function under international capitalism. While financial capital float freely, this is not the case for more material beings and objects, humans and nonhumans alike. Instead these are kept at bay, or terminated to construct ‘the nation’ and ‘us’. This experimental film helps to open questions around the multitude purposes of killing aliens, taking us beyond the functionalist, rationalist, environmentalist and popularized single story-lines that are based on preserving biodiversity, saving indigenous plants and coming together across race and class to take care of the planet.
In preparing this particular film, which is part of a “parliament of artifacts” that tries to assemble the multiple voices and grammars that any political ecology is filled with, we chip inspiration from Jakob von Uexküll’s (2010 [1934]: 3) conviction that “nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology [or ecology] worthy of the name”. The medium of video and sound is our means for speculating about the inner worlds of nonhuman beings, while importantly also exploring the role that aliens in any form (human, nonhuman, object-like) bring to the constitution of an organized, and ultimately false inside, be that the unity of ‘the Cape Town Biodiversity Network’, ‘the nation’, the ‘European Community’—or for that matter, ‘the anthropocene’.
Source of the story: The video is based on long-term fieldwork and film work in Cape Town, South Africa.
This film “remixes” the artwork "I Am Mountain to Measure Impermanence"(Hanna Ljungh, 2016, 5 h.32 min), and "One Table Two Elephants" (Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson 2018, 84 min).
This is a film about bushmen bboys, a flower kingdom and the ghost of a princess. Entering the city through it's plants and wetlands, the many-layered, painful and liberating history of the city emerges as we see how biologists, hip hoppers, and wetland activists each searches for ways to craft symbols of unity and cohesion. But this is a fraught and difficult task. Perhaps not even desirable. Plants, aliens, memories and ghosts keep troubling efforts of weaving stories about this place called Cape Town.
Situated and grounded in lived experiences across a range of groups, this film follows different ways of knowing and tries to be a vehicle toward difficult yet urgently needed conversations about how race, nature and the city are intertwined in our postcolonial world.
The film is directed towards a wider audience, from the general public to students and scholars. For teaching, it brings texture and understanding to understand a city like Cape Town, but also provides ample possibilities to translate what is happening “there” to conversations about your own city and surroundings.
Talks by Jacob von Heland
Newspaper articles by Jacob von Heland
Situated and grounded in lived experiences across a range of groups, this film follows different ways of knowing and tries to be a vehicle toward difficult yet urgently needed conversations about how race, nature and the city are intertwined in our postcolonial world where history is ever present in subtle and direct ways.
This ‘cinematic ethnography’ is directed towards a wide audience, from the general public, to students and scholars, as it brings texture to understand a city like Cape Town, while providing ample possibilities to translate what is happening “there” to conversations about other cities and surroundings. It is based on years of research in Cape Town and was filmed in 2015 as part of a longer-term research and film-project on ontological politics and urban political ecology.
The film had its World Premiere on 20 March 2018 at CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Film Festival (cinema Dagmar) and was nominated to the DOX:Nordic Award. During 2016 and 2017, a shorter First Cut version (47 minutes) was screened at several universities and cities in the world with feedback becoming part of the editing process, including Durban, Windhoek, Stellenbosch, Grahamstown, New York, Palo Alto, Rome, Munich, Trier, and Stockholm. The film will have its world premiere in 2018.
Created by: Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson. Photography: Johan von Reybekiel. Sound: Jonathan Chiles. Sound mixing: Jakob Oldenburg. Music: Louise Becker. Additional music: Dave Reynolds and Pops Mohammed. Production coordination: Jessica Rattle and Nceba Mangese. Graphic design Erik Hartin. Editing: Jacob von Heland. Assistant editing: Henrik Ernstson. Research: Henrik Ernstson & Jacob von Heland. Produced by: Telltales Film in collaboration with The Situated Ecologies Platform and KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Funded by: Swedish Research Council Formas with support from the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.
Scholarly reference:
Von Heland, Jacob, and Henrik Ernstson (2018) One Table Two Elephants (84 minutes, cinematic ethnography, film, Color, HD, Dolby 5:1). World Premiere In Competition at CPH:DOX March 20, 2018. The Situated Ecologies Platform (CC-BY-NC): Stockholm. Stable URL (Open Access): https://vimeo.com/298166514.
Official trailer: http://bit.ly/1T2Ewatch
Stream the FULL FILM (and find resources on how to teach with the film): http://www.situatedecologies.net/teaching-resources/one-table-two-elephants/teaching-the-film-one-table-two-elephants/
Several characters come and go in front of the camera. Some of them, young kids, are equipped with machetes that start hacking us to pieces, felling us there and then. Others are equipped with seemingly less dangerous tools, a clipboard and a camera, and they scribble notes about us on pieces of paper, which in turn gets plugged into a computer database; a hand moves a computer mouse to register the scale of our existence and the GPS coordinates of where exactly we live and thrive. Yet others (not shown in the current short clip) use silence-wrecking chainsaws making the pain pitching high, but short. While we, the unwanted plants—deemed the ultimate foreigner and alien—are certainly placed in the category of waste, as useless, we also witness, as we are chopped down, the coherence we bring to a project of keeping the inside of a postcolonial state calm and organised. We, the aliens, provide the purpose and fetish of “rainbowed” unification.
As Bonnie Honig (2001) but also Jean and John Comaroff (2001) have pointedly analyzed, aliens perform an important productive role for liberal democracy and the postcolony to function under international capitalism. While financial capital float freely, this is not the case for more material beings and objects, humans and nonhumans alike. Instead these are kept at bay, or terminated to construct ‘the nation’ and ‘us’. This experimental film helps to open questions around the multitude purposes of killing aliens, taking us beyond the functionalist, rationalist, environmentalist and popularized single story-lines that are based on preserving biodiversity, saving indigenous plants and coming together across race and class to take care of the planet.
In preparing this particular film, which is part of a “parliament of artifacts” that tries to assemble the multiple voices and grammars that any political ecology is filled with, we chip inspiration from Jakob von Uexküll’s (2010 [1934]: 3) conviction that “nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology [or ecology] worthy of the name”. The medium of video and sound is our means for speculating about the inner worlds of nonhuman beings, while importantly also exploring the role that aliens in any form (human, nonhuman, object-like) bring to the constitution of an organized, and ultimately false inside, be that the unity of ‘the Cape Town Biodiversity Network’, ‘the nation’, the ‘European Community’—or for that matter, ‘the anthropocene’.
Source of the story: The video is based on long-term fieldwork and film work in Cape Town, South Africa.
This film “remixes” the artwork "I Am Mountain to Measure Impermanence"(Hanna Ljungh, 2016, 5 h.32 min), and "One Table Two Elephants" (Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson 2018, 84 min).
This is a film about bushmen bboys, a flower kingdom and the ghost of a princess. Entering the city through it's plants and wetlands, the many-layered, painful and liberating history of the city emerges as we see how biologists, hip hoppers, and wetland activists each searches for ways to craft symbols of unity and cohesion. But this is a fraught and difficult task. Perhaps not even desirable. Plants, aliens, memories and ghosts keep troubling efforts of weaving stories about this place called Cape Town.
Situated and grounded in lived experiences across a range of groups, this film follows different ways of knowing and tries to be a vehicle toward difficult yet urgently needed conversations about how race, nature and the city are intertwined in our postcolonial world.
The film is directed towards a wider audience, from the general public to students and scholars. For teaching, it brings texture and understanding to understand a city like Cape Town, but also provides ample possibilities to translate what is happening “there” to conversations about your own city and surroundings.