extractivism

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.

In a country like Spain, where rural areas have historically been subject to dispossession and marginalisation, Jose’s work reveals the ravages of extractivism, from lithium mining to solar panel monocultures. He links these practices to historical processes of conquest, latifundism, and the privatisation of the countryside, while also exploring the ways in which communities resist and seek to build alternatives. In this podcast, Jose Iglesias García-Arenal invites us to imagine interstices of possibility where community resistance, historical memories, and art come together to redefine how we inhabit the world. We talk about invented traditions, olive trees, sheep, looms, and the complex interactions between past, present and future.

In this conversation, we talk with Maya-Kaqchikel artist and activist Marilyn Boror Bor about languages, textiles, relationality, extractivism, and cement. She tells us about the slow violence of processes of assimilation, about the importance of the Mayan language and culture, and of how colonisation has demonised ancestral knowledge. She recounts what it means to live in a land perforated by a cement factory, where water scarcity becomes the norm and mountains are drilled until they lose their spirit. Hence the urgency of the connection to the land and indigenous struggles, which are not new, but have always existed: a millennial memory that still breathes.