Macarena Gómez-Barris’s The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017) addresses five scenes of ruinous capitalism, theorizing how we can shift our perception towards political and social potential. To extend this conversation, a group of artists-activists-scholars addresses these questions: how can artistic, filmic, activist, and experimental approaches make visible the spaces of environmental and social ruin and the lasting imprint of multiple catastrophes upon our perception of social life? What forms of writing, activity, and making art in the interstices of life/death worlds allow us to differently inhabit viewpoints beyond the extractive view?
cover image: still from Mencer ñi Pewma, directed by Francisco Huichaqueo
As scholars, activists, and artists, how can we address spaces of ruinous capitalism to raise the possibility of decolonial futures? This Periscope issue is a collaborative effort to think about and provide responses to this complex question from a number … Continue reading “Decolonial Futures”
In her 2010 Sydney Peace Prize acceptance speech, Vandana Shiva asserted that the “bigger war”—bigger than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—was “the war against the planet.” With the slogan to make the United States “energy dominant,” the Trump administration, … Continue reading “Resisting the War on Alaska’s Arctic with Multispecies Justice”
Entropy (noun) 1. a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder 2. chaos, disorganization, randomness There is a scarcity of platforms that make space for Indigenous youth to represent themselves and speak back to the stories … Continue reading “Indigenous Youth, Standing Rock, and the Rise of Anti-Colonial Entropy”
I began to investigate the El Quimbo hydroelectric power project on the Magdalena River after reading the following headline in March 2012: “The River Refuses to Shift its Course.” El Quimbo is a dam built on the Yuma River–the Indigenous … Continue reading “Hunger as a Teacher”
Economic modes of extractivism, austerity, and disaster capitalism increasingly intertwine in Puerto Rico, where at present we are witnessing the privatization of the public sphere on a massive scale. The path to austerity for Puerto Rico was already set before … Continue reading “The Other Puerto Rico”
The islands now known as the US Virgin Islands have a long and complicated relationship with racialized processes of capital accumulation. Along with neighboring islands across the Caribbean region, St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John served as important nodes … Continue reading “Beyond the Fragments of Global Wealth”
The Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo’s Minimum Monument (cover image above) is an ephemeral public art project comprised of hundreds of tiny human ice figures positioned in urban spaces. From the moment they are installed, the sculptures are already in thaw, … Continue reading “Monumental Extinctions”
Jaden Smith’s music video Fallen (directed by Miles Cable and Jaden Smith, USA, 2016, 4 min and 39 sec.) staggers and then collapses face first into settler-imperial iconographies of occupation. In the video, Smith–the actor, musician, model, and self-proclaimed living … Continue reading “Sampling the Land and the Trappings of Empire: Jaden Smith’s Moving-Image Settler Aesthetic”
On the third floor of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, couched between dinosaur skeletons and luminescent gems and crystals, sits the Tom Hunt Energy Hall. Plans for the hall were announced in 2008, declaring it … Continue reading “The Cinema of Extractions in Dallas, Texas”
