Agenda

Learning With workshop series
Fractal catastrophes generate new solidarities
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Queen Mary, University of London
in dialogue with Antonia Majaca

10.00-13.00
Malcanton Marcorà (Aula Biral)
Extractivism has never operated unopposed. Across the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americas, self-emancipated people (maroons) bypassed the plantation grid, island hopping across the colonial archipelago. African and Indigenous peoples made lifeworlds in the mountains and swamplands that colonial cartographers drew as a void, forging strength in diffractive unity through the ancient technology of syncretism. In the twentieth century, these networks continued to branch and spiraled back across the Atlantic. The Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) built guerrilla bases in the Maiombe forest of Cabinda, inland from the old Portuguese slave port, and folded its liberation movement into the non-aligned common cause against the extractive world order.

Each time such resistance gains ground, extraction changes form. Abolition of the slave trade gave way to "legitimate commerce" and imperialism. When the anticolonial movements rose up, extractivism drilled deeper, into oil. In November 1975, on the eve of Angolan independence, we receive the report that the US Gulf Oil Corporation is pumping 160,000 barrels of oil per day in Maiombe. A month and a half later, an uncanny picture emerges: of Cuban soldiers defending the US corporate facility on behalf of the MPLA. While the US government would temporarily ban Gulf Oil's collaboration with the MPLA, the two entities – capitalist and socialist – would eventually form an enduring corporate partnership that characterizes the dynamics of our current moment: a planetary web of solidarity unraveling into a leaking web of oil infrastructure fueling planetary catastrophe.

The workshop interweaves differential approaches to return without repetition, including the Akan concept of sankofa, the Bakongo dikênga, Engels's notion of spiral development, and the notion of diffraction drawn from quantum physics. This workshop will bring participants together to unpack the fractal, contradictory, and oscillatory dynamics of extractivist violence and anti-extractivist resistance, searching for signs of the next recursive reorientation away from our collective self-destruction and toward nonassimilative reintegration.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, writer and architectural researcher, raised in New Orleans and based in London, where she is a doctoral candidate in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Her work investigates the "continuum of extractivism", which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate chaos. Conceptualizing extractivism as a cosmology, she reworks the vectors of corporate-colonial violence into networks of solidarity and paths to ecological reparations, combining archival research, remote sensing, counter-cartography, oral history and legal theory in video installations, sculptural objects and murals. Her research has been presented as investigative reports and as legal testimony in courtrooms and at the United Nations. She holds an MA in Forensic Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London.

http://imanijacquelinebrown.net

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme
(GA n. 949742 HealthXCross).