Have You Seen a Subhuman Cry? How the Films Extractions (Theo Jean Cuthand, 2019) and Eme Cosmos (Mia Yu, 2024) Explore Cosmotechnical Worldings in Canada and China

The contribution compares the artistic short films Extractions by Theo Jean Cuthand (2019) and Eme Cosmos (2024) by Mia Yu, exploring their aesthetic “worlding” of extractivist presents in Canada and the People’s Republic of China. The films resemble each other in their critical integration of documentary footage of lumber and coal mining as well as their technologically enhanced imaging including ultrasound and drone-filmed footage, which are critically interrelated and queered with autoethnographic story-telling. In Cuthand’s film, the harvesting of human eggs for artificial fertilization is shown as a radical means to ensure indigenous survival after settler colonialism. In Yu’s case the evocation of the mythical goddess Eme, who reincarnates in three iterations, surveys the seemingly impossible transformation of Fushun, a Northern Chinese mining city, into a “greener” environment. While both artists’ insights in today’s problematic state of long-standing open mining is eye opening and calling for decolonization in planetary regards, it also attests to the on-going and globally connected extractivism supported by governmental and corporate agencies. This is however not the end of their stories: The artists embrace modern technologies, reverse and complicate linear progressivist temporality, and “mine” their own bodies and imagination to tell planetary stories otherwise. They tactically work through spatiotemporal tensions of modernity in “feral assemblages” as Yu calls it, allowing viewers to experience a particular situatedness, historical transcultural entanglements, and contemporary relations through particular “cosmotechnics.” This also holds explanatory potential for the “Sinophonecene,” beyond state-fostered notions of “ecological civilization.”