Ecologies of Repair
with Imani Jacqueline Brown and Carolina Caycedo
As part of the Climate Emergency > Emergence programme, the maat Climate Collective is joined by two artists, Imani Jacqueline Brown and Carolina Caycedo, both working at the nexus of climate disaster, environmental racism, and colonial extractivism, against which any reparative horizon must begin with cultivating the collective memory of environmental violence in the face of the ongoing forces of erasure and displacement. In Brown’s case, she investigates Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana, revealing a geography where some of the most polluting petrochemical facilities overlay and threaten to displace plantation-era cemeteries of the historically enslaved, materialising a trajectory of racial, toxic capitalism that continues to physiologically debilitate majority-Black fence-line communities in the present. Caycedo’s recent work, The Blessings of the Mystery, made in collaboration with David de Rozas, focuses on West Texas and the region’s complex histories of colonisation, migration, and ecological precarity, examined from the perspective of Juan Mancias, Chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. Our discussion will foreground aesthetic approaches to socio-environmental violence, including forensic visuality, observational documentary, Black and Indigenous ecologies, multigenerational oral history, and archival politics, as well as asking where the critically expository might open up reparatory possibility.
— Climate Collective: T. J. Demos, Molemo Moiloa, Susan Schuppli and Paulo Tavares
Certainly, any sort of practice of care should be a gesture, an offering amidst a much deeper, more systemic kind of process, a movement.
Imani Jacqueline Brown
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The Climate Emergency > Emergence public programme initiative energises critical analyses and creative proposals in moving beyond catastrophism and toward the emergence of environmentally sustainable futures. Interdisciplinary in breadth and international in scope, the programme is conceptualised by the newly-formed 2021 Climate Collective: T. J. Demos (USA), chair and chief-curator, Molemo Moiloa (South Africa), Susan Schuppli (UK), Paulo Tavares (Brazil), geared toward assembling diverse cultural practitioners working at the intersection of experimental arts and political ecology.
As part of the programme taking place from April until December 2021, the Climate Collective has curated an online video screening series featuring films by a variety of international and local practitioners around themes addressed in the ongoing events. |
“maat Explorations” is a programme framework featuring an ongoing series of exhibitions, public and educational projects delving into the multi-faceted subject of environmental transformation from various scholarly and experimental vantage points – it brings philosophical and political perspectives forward, as well as sociocultural and technological investigations interwoven in speculative and critical practices in the arts and design at large.
Central to the discursive and critical effort of “maat Explorations” is the establishment of the Climate Collective, a rotating group of experts in the expanded field of contemporary art, design and technology that will each year propose a refreshed vision on the connection between creative practices, ecological thought and politics. |
Illustration: Lisa Hartje Moura
We all have to come back home. I don't know what home is for each of us, how we're going to come back home, but that's how we're going to recover this place. Each of us has to come back home.
Carolina Caycedo
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Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and researcher from New Orleans. Her work investigates the continuum of extractivism, from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to contemporary gentrification, fossil fuel production, and police and corporate impunity. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that comprise the foundations of US society, she opens room to imagine a path to ecological reparations. Among other things, Imani is currently a researcher with Forensic Architecture and a visiting research fellow at the Center for Research Architecture, where she received her MA with distinction in 2019.
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Carolina Caycedo is a London-born Colombian artist living in Los Angeles. She participates in movements of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right. Carolina’s artistic practice has a collective dimension to it in which performances, drawings, photographs and videos are not just an end result, but rather part of the artist’s process of research and acting. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities, and generates a debate about the future in relation to common goods, environmental justice, just energy transition, and cultural biodiversity.
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