Media in Environmental Activism on the Borders of Arkhangelsk Oblast and Komi Republic. Fieldwork as Video Curation

Résumé En

In 2018, a section of the gigantic taiga in Northwest Russia, in the south- west of the Arkhangelsk’s region, was chosen by the Moscow authorities to accommodate a domestic waste landfill. For twenty years, the site—located in a former train station called Shies—was to receive millions of tons of waste, transported by train from Moscow, 1,200 km away. Shies would have become the biggest landfill of Europe. Starting from summer 2018, villagers close to the site, and later the inhabitants of the Arkhangelsk region and from the neighboring Komi Republic, carried out protest initiatives— establishing a camp (a sort of occupation or ZAD1), monitoring stations around the construction site, and organizing around thirty daily meetings in cities and villages. Following two years of conflict, the inhabitants won: the project was abandoned after Putin gave in to the political pressure. The mobilization effort focused on the occupation of the site near the construction, in Shies. Rooted into the territory, it became visible and public due to the participation of inhabitants of both regions and others from other parts of the country. These participants took many pictures, widely shared via social media. To study them, I developed a visual ethnography approach.