In 2125, Eve works for the Bureau of Environmental Imaging and Memory Analysis (BEIMA), an intergovernmental institution established in the aftermath of an unnamed ecological catastrophe. The Bureau is responsible for capturing ecological underthoughts—dreams, thoughts, and feelings unconsciously generated by Nature. Drawing on ecofeminist critique, Black hauntologies, and critical fabulation, BEIMA proposes ecological remembrance as a procedural labour essential to the protection of Nature.
Central to the Bureau is a method called conditional apparition, which seeks to enable re-encounters with near-extinct species through creative staging, including dance, installation, film, and written accounts. Conditional apparition operates as a representational strategy through which endangered and disappeared species are reactivated in cultural memory.
Eve is an exhausted but dedicated bureaucrat in the Special Office of the Haunted, Cinema of Ecological Grief Division. To work in this office, one must be sufficiently haunted by ecological grief—the irreparable sorrow felt in response to devastated species, places, and landscapes. Eve’s responsibility is to inventory and perform memories pressed upon her by snowdrop plants, beluga whales, and river dolphins. Her work at the Bureau thus involves archival research at the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where the last living Baiji dolphin died in 2002 and efforts to protect the Yangtze finless porpoise have continued. Eve draws on the fieldnotes of an anonymous woman researcher who conducted fieldwork there in 2023. In lieu of repairing Eve’s estranged relationship with her father, who worked for the Department of Air and Sea, Eve delves into her archive to escape childhood.
This dissertation offers a glimpse into life at the Bureau through an assemblage of official documents, family histories, diaries, reports, and dream journals, treating ecological grief as a condition through which ecological remembrance and more-than-human care may flourish.