• 01:19 Myung Mi Kim: The violence that accompanies the temporal-spatial marks in capturing experience or sensation
  • 02:55 Kathryn Yusoff: Residing in the temporality of one's own and the violence of description
  • 05:10 Paring down the durational
  • 05:53 Making language strange again
  • 06:58 Language used as a mono-temporality
  • 07:39 What it means to be exposed, histories of brokenness and geo-traumas
  • 10:05 Poem excerpt
  • 12:22 The fiction of the separation between human, non-human and inhuman
  • 13:27 Thinking around clusters of ideas: unlearning the world through unlearning the human
  • 15:49 How to make natural resources strange
  • 17:18 Different durations of geology
  • 19:08 How does documentation happen and what is it? What is its extractive properties and what is it its potential to be more than a document.
  • 20:05 The relationship between politics and poetry
  • 22:46 Putting back silences and pauses. Describing is always a precursor of forms of extraction
  • 24:58 Devotional languages
  • 27:18 "The place I'm from is no longer on any map"
  • 28:49 Poem excerpt
  • 29:45 Geologic and deep time
  • 32:52 Poem excerpt
  • 34:34 Problematisation of liveness: a particular kind of life that is paid attention to
  • 36:05 In some ways, life is both the problem and the possibility
  • 37:24 What the intelligible and unintelligible is
  • 39:14 Shamica Ruddock "Sun Dial 51.3861°, 1.3520°"
05/07/2022 49' 31''
English
A small-scale miner illegally digs coal from an abandoned, former Anker Coal operation just outside Ermelo, Mpumalanga. Image by Mark Olalde. South Africa, 2017.

Curated by Sophie J Williamson

Undead Matter is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia.

In this second episode, geographer Kathryn Yusoff speaks with poet Myung Mi Kim about the potencies of past lives, traumas, histories and possibilities that are held in the demarcated silences between the rock strata and between words. They consider the multiple ‘broken worlds’ that have come before our current perceptions of ecological crisis, and how descriptions of geologies have perpetuated colonial narratives erasing the geotraumas imposed on peoples through colonial extraction and violence. They question the possible sites of politics, intimacies and scripts of life, as places with the potential to activate new realities, as matter and words reform around us, time and again. Interweaving the conversation are readings of Kim’s poetry and a sound work by artist Shamica Ruddock. At the end of the podcast, the full sound work by Ruddock, Sun Dial 51.3861°, 1.3520° plays out, as it reaches downwards to the geological substrata beneath our feet.

Undead Matter, initiated and convened by curator Sophie J Williamson, is an ongoing collective project, materialising slowly and organically in exhibitions, events, podcasts, publishing and the intangible. The Undead Matter programme has emerged through intersecting collaborations with artists, poets, dancers and musicians, as well cryomicrobiologists, shamen, paleontologists, mineralogists, archaeoastronomers, woodworkers, quantum physicists, bondage masters, cryonics speculators and others encountered along the way. Each offers a perspective on our place within the infinite impermanence of life: past, present and possible.

This series of podcasts traverses the slippery space between the organic and the inorganic. The conversations travel from remote Arctic tundra, where ancient creatures are emerge from the melting permafrost; to deep within the geological substrata of the ocean bed among the sludge of millennia-old microorganisms; outward to the celestial expanse of interstellar dust, full of life-giving potential; and back again.

This podcast was supported by the Centre for the GeoHumanities, Royal Holloway University of London and the European Research Council funded project, Think Deep (Grant no: 863944). Curated by Sophie J Williamson. Produced by Undead Matter. Sound work by Shamica Ruddock. Sound by Either/Or Recordings. Image by Mark Olalde. South Africa, 2017.
ResearchUndead MatterSophie J WilliamsonMyung Mi KimShamica RuddockKathryn Yusoffpoetryphilosophydecolonialismindigenous movementsgeography

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