SON[I]A #409
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Fallow fields and burial grounds
From Zucotti Park to Katrina: a new political consciousness
The BP oil spill
A mutual aid society
Housing crisis and blighted homes
Blight, poverty and a history of eugenics
Demolition, debt and a fossil free fest
From Petrochemical corridor to plantation country: the work of Forensic Architecture
Freetown, fenceline communities and nimbyism
Forensic architecture, burial grounds and the work of Rise St. James
Mutations and consistencies in the slavery landscape
Antebellum plantations
Shell and Coastal Environments Inc.
Burial grounds as micro ecologie
Black ecologies: Herman Wallace and Sylvia Winter
The burial grove as portal
An ecological diaspora
The Haitian revolution and a long history of organizing
El Taller Negro Experimental
"A common wind"
The Berlin Biennale: networks of oil infrastructure as constellation
"What remains at the ends of the earth?", 2022
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Imani Jacqueline Brown (New Orleans, 1988) is an artist, activist, writer, and researcher from New Orleans. Her work maps the scope and ongoing violence of the capitalist and extractivist agents that led to slavery, colonial genocide and ecological saturation.
From the microecologies of black antebellum cemeteries that manifest as groves of trees interrupting a horizon of sugarcane plantations and petrochemical plants, to the gentrification of New Orleans on the back of hurricane Katrina, Imani’s practice exposes the layers of violence that underpin settler-colonial society. At the same time, she discovers overlapping and enduring practices of ecological resistance and care through time and space in black ecologies.
A research fellow with Forensic Architecture, Imani’s work combines peoples’ and oral history, ecological philosophy and counter-cartography. Her research is disseminated through art installations and public actions, and also as testimony delivered in courtrooms and forums of the United Nations.
In this podcast, Imani Jacqueline Brown tells us about her formative experience as an activist in New Orleans and in the crucible of Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. We also talk about eugenics and about how Carl Linnaeus’s philosophy during the Enlightement divided existence into parcels of private property, about oil infrastructure networks and environmental racism in Death Alley, and about apocalypse as repeated events. Along the way, Imani imagines paths to ecological reparation, ways to steward and attend to the world. She finds that it is precisely the uncultivated land at the back of the plantation that is rich with life and possibility: the seed banks of new growth.
CONVERSATION: ANNA RAMOS. SCRIPT AND SOUND PRODUCTION: André Chêdas. VOICE OVER: ROC JIMÉNEZ DE CISNEROS. SOUNDS: RWM WORKING GROUP SOUND LIBRARY.
Eyal Weizman
In our second conversation with founding director of Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman, we explore further the nuances of their sophisticated research practice, this time focusing on the notions of time and duration from a forensic perspective in order to unfold multiple temporalities from an instant. In doing so, Weizman explains how to build a case for public truth using clouds, architecture, metadata, shadows, testimonies, and surveillance and satellite imagery.
M Murphy
Murphy works with and against technoscience in the areas of environmental justice and data politics, colonialism, sexuality, reproduction and race. Their approach is interdisciplinary not only in the sense of involving various areas of knowledge, but also in enacting their dual responsibility: the almost impossible task of dismantling extractive racial capitalism, by means of re-imagining radical Black, queer, Indigenous and feminist decolonial horizons and worlds of care. In this podcast, Murphy walks us through permission-to-pollute infrastructures in and around Chemical Valley in the Great Lakes area, the largest basin of fresh surface water on the planet.
Samaneh Moafi
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. 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.