Son[i]a #335
Samaneh Moafi
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Samaneh Moafi is an architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She oversees the Centre For Contemporary Nature, a division within Forensic Architecture which explores the relationship between human rights violations, environmental violence, and anthropogenic climate change. The Centre’s activist research into environmental damage challenges the historical perception of nature as a static, eternal backdrop against which human activity unfolds and calls for a new understanding of nature — contemporary nature — which is now entangled with human agency in a feedback loop with consequences far beyond our control.
In this podcast, Samaneh Moafi turns our gaze to notions of ecocide, negative commons and environmental violence in pursuit of accountability and change. In doing so, she takes us through the Negev desert, extraterritorial toxic clouds, orangutan nests in Indonesia, forest fires and weaponised wind gusts in the Gaza strip.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with finish artist Terike Haapoja that we were unable to include the first time around.
Terike Haapoja
Finnish artist Terike Haapoja invites us to imagine this posthumanism: a hybrid, expansive, empathetic “we” with room for ambiguity and difference and for interspecies political understanding, in which the morbid fantasy of human exceptionalism and the hierarchy of species is put to rest once and for all. Drawing on concepts such as Syl Ko’s black veganism, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s expanded theory of animal rights, and Carol J. Adams’ sexual politics of meat, Terike Haapoja ventures to imagine a world beyond animalisation and distinctions between protected and disposable beings.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Samaneh Moafi. We talk about strategies for establishing cases of ecocide, about the complexity of analysing satellite images, about carbon monoxide mapping, and about working in networks.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer and researcher Cara New Daggett. We talk about the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, feminist citation practices, collective writing and the difficulties academia still has with such exercises. We share the traumatic experience of being trolled after writing her essay "Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire". Coping with the pandemic and parenting with the climate crisis on the horizon are also brought to the table.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores into the contemporary politics of listening and the role of the voice in law.