 Hi, everyone. I'm T.G. Deimos, and it's great to be here. My presentation is called Racial Capitalism, Ecology, and Abolition. How is contemporary art, including British formations, reconfigured how we understand terms like ecology, environment, and climate, in ways that expand the horizons of eco-critical speculative discourse, its sociopolitical stakes, and its resonances with socio-environmental practices more broadly. In this, there's no simple category, I think, of British art, owing to transnational formal genealogies, conceptual affiliations, geopolitical solidarities, and diasporic and migratory practices, rendering the national, as an umbrella term, largely artificial, just as natural forces. The second key term in the present conference is irreducibly plural heterogeneous and global, as we learn in extensive anthropocene research that has inextricably joined natural and cultural histories to multi-scalar frames as much as deep, expansive geological times, even with geographically and historically differentiated effects. Approaching the state of the field, then, by first questioning the coherence of states and fields. I'd like to discuss speculative and artistic approaches to ecology, environment, and climate, terms that, at their most ambitious conceptualization in certain creative constellations, are insistently connective, tentacular, to use Donna Harroway's terms, entangled in Karen Barad's, and intersectionalist, with many lessons aesthetically, politically, methodologically, and historically for us to consider. Let's first look at the Autolith Group's Infinity Minus Infinity, the London-based collective's 2019 film linking racial capitalism with the colonial genocide perpetrated during the racial capitalist scenes, beginnings in the 16th century's conquest of the Americas, the racial capitalists scene being a term used by Francoise Vergès as well. Between 1492 and 1610, the conquest brought the destruction of some 50 million Amerindians leading to massive afforestation and a noticeable drop in atmospheric carbon measurable in the stratigraphic record. Infinity's expansive genealogy builds further on this political geology to include the so-called hostile environment of recent British immigration policy, especially that affecting the Windrush generation of migrants living both in the afterlife of slavery and in the post-colonial wake of empire, the Windrush generation referring to those Commonwealth citizens arriving in the United Kingdom from Caribbean islands between 1948 and 1971 only to have their residency and indeed their British citizenship status questioned and even rejected decades later by recent British migration policies. The film's cinematic allegory traces these complex historical networks as mediated by performance, dance, recital, and historical truth-telling spoken by figures who appear as trans-temporal deities as you can see in this still. Indeed, one central character appears manyheaded, an Indo-futurist trope signaling multiple realities or a future of many futures in a time-splitting act of metaphysical and even cosmopolitical import. Through these means and more, the video choreographs what the artists call a choreopoetics, creatively drawing on African-American playwright and poet Entezaki Shange's model indebted to the Black Arts movement in the U.S. of a multimedia aesthetic of creative collective speech geared toward emotional impact, which the Odlef group puts to task against the calculative machinery of abstract carbon statistics. Infinity's script is drawn from diverse sources, including the writings of Jamaican poet Una Marsen, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, the Brazilian sociologist Denise Ferreira de Silva, and British geographer Catherine Youssef. The invasion of Europeans in the Americas resulted in a massive genocide of the indigenous population, leading to a decline from 54 million people to approximately 6 million. This led to a massive reduction in farming and the regeneration of forests and carbon uptake, leading to an observed decline in Antarctic ice cores, the CO2 in the atmosphere. Even from this brief entrance, we get a sense of the expansive basis of the socio-environmental as an innovative conceptual category in the Odlef group's multi-scaler and multi-temporal cinema. The space-time conditions of ecology in its capacious function as a structure of relationalities, what I call ecology as intersectionality, which has emerged as a compelling aesthetic and conceptual methodology of recent eco-critical practice. Building off the insights of political ecology, this approach, which I've written about previously as in this essay in Panorama, this approach conceptualizes aesthetic practices that model ecology as tentacular and entangled, as when insisting on the inseparability between environmental matters of concern and socio-political and economic frameworks of justice and injustice. Intersectionality emerges from a long history of African American activism and anti-racist, anti-sexist politics from writers such as Sojourner Truth or Anna Julia Cooper and Alexandra Colanty to Bell Hooks, Claudia Jones and the Kumbahee River Collective and Angela Davis. More recently codified in the Black Feminist Legal Theory of Kimberly Crenshaw, it's understood within contemporary struggles for indigenous decolonization within anti-capitalist organizing and refuses to divide overlapping systems of oppression tied to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and so on, thereby challenging the essentialization of one or another term in isolation. I argue that ecology functions as an interlinking site of indissoluble relationality between forces and materialities that are co-determined and co-constituted by interaction with these multiple fields or better, intra-action in the sense posited by Karen Barad, whose feminist science studies theorization of quantum field theory rejects the separateness and purity of originary categories. Just as carbon pollution, for instance, is highlighted by the environmentalist organizations like Extinction Rebellion, materializes differential socio-political impacts and there is indeed no way to account for toxicity outside of its disparate consequences. So too does economic inequality produce distinctive vulnerabilities to environmental injustice as underlined within recent Black Lives Matter protests. With the siloing of issues, whether eco-art models tendency to isolate and celebrate the non-human realm in an effort to escape anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism or in mainstream environmentalism's tendency to abstract atmospheric carbon from its actual socio-ecological impacts or even social justice arts foregrounding of social oppression disconnected from the more than human, we risk committing epistemic violence which can translate into the extremes of exclusion in colorblind white environmentalism or green capitalism's emission of social justice all detached from social and economic formations and politics at a time of expanding inequalities something that I also see in the work of Olafur Eliasson. In our emergency times of disastrous environmental transformation and militarized climate control exemplified in forensic architecture's recent work called Triple Chaser and the globalization of the use of tear gas as a form of militarized atmospherics it's urgent to consider these entanglements whether where biogeophysical ecologies merge in precise and differentiated ways with socio-political and economic ones so as to challenge white supremacy the militarization of everyday life creeping eco-fascism apocalyptic populism as well as mass extinction. With the time I have I'd like to consider a few examples of resistant practices which are also intervening in documentary and moving image art where representational aesthetics combine with conceptual and historical resonances in ways that reveal new potential futures leaving the present state of the field and our understanding of natural forces altered in turn with her compelling contribution to indigenous futurism toronto-based therza gene cut hands reclamation from 2018 documents what's to come premised upon a mass settler exodus to mars in the near future the short video portrays a broken abandoned earth left to indigenous peoples who free who freed from uh extractive devastation toxic racism repressive heteronormativity and the endless wars and violence of capitalist property relations subsequently begin the work of post-colonial environmental restoration delivered through familiar documentary tropes the piece showcases interviewees discussing their newfound lives with contextualizing footage of dystopian landscapes presented in the evidentiary mode with a handheld camera's reality effects its futurism unleashes radical formal possibilities in both decolonizing time reversing the conventional documentaries ties to pastness projecting the that which has been into what's to come and generating forces of creation beyond the memetic doubling of reified and colonial realities it thereby lays an explosive charge in the present through a performative imagination rendering the future as disruption disruption from colonization as much as capitalism that much more probable i was scared that they had done so much to the spine that there'd be no way for us to fix it the law cleaner not the law cleaner like it smells good here in me it smells like make it smells like we're making a difference here we've cleaned a lot of this area up this is what we do clean up things make sure the area is safe for barefoot washing pretty much uh and this is just one of our things we have we sell for approximately five hundred thousand yen with white people left so our job is cleaning up out these cubes you see some picking up that's what everybody does around here here documentary figures as the creative practice of chronopolitics designating the politics of time as much as the time of politics both implying there's nothing natural or inevitable about how we organize temporality with it we confront the challenge of thinking ecology's relationalities through the spectrum of temporality and are asked to consider ecologies of time radically other two for instance settler colonial time or the implacable linear progressivism of capitalist realism and their multiply excluded peoples dates matter as zoe Todd and heather davis argue in relation to Anthropocene narratives and so too is temporality a modality of ecology as such documentary provides a technology for revealing portals into futures alternative to the now recalling our end up to Roy's description of the current pandemic conjuncture structural breakdown discloses newfound opportunities for a creative transformation of what's yet to be passing through that portal we can cast a barrier of eternity between the barbarism of the present and the justice of the hereafter the stakes are indeed enormous we're caught in a situation in which time has been colonized racialized and economized generating what black quantum futurism the afrofuturist collective based in philadelphia term the temporal ghettos of racial capitalism unfolding over hundreds of years where the master's clockwork universe unevenly distributes spatio temporal mobility agency and determination just as material inequality rains globally we succumb as well to an endless present of capital's calculative machinery seemingly but falsely rendering resistance pointless time operationalized as such recalls what jasper poor terms prehensive futurity a chronology that in her words inevitable eyes is a desired unfolding we cannot get out of the present because we are tethered to the desired future past present and future feel somewhat futile as descriptions of temporal distinctions according to poor conventional documentary as well as corporate media tends to reify that time trap cut hands reclamation a decolonization of time as much as of space a poignantly contest dominant ecologies of temporality including techno libertarianism's prehensive futurity and its colon colonialism of land the economy and the info sphere of communications it's as if its vision of what's to come is a foregone foregone conclusion as when the billionaire tech entrepreneur ilan musk who in a recent response to charges of complicity in the recent in the anti-democratic political takeover in bolivia in part to secure lithium reserves for global markets included for his own including for his own tesla cars and space x project tweeted we will coo whoever we want deal with it performing the hegemic hegemonic futurity to which we're all tethered musk pushes extractive colonial capitalism into any and all territories including outer space as well as into infinity thankfully that right wing coo has been reversed though in recent bolivian elections still musk's futurism entails destroying the lands waters and life chances of frontline communities worldwide producing a growing class of the indebted vulnerable and disenfranchised subjected to all manner of police violence incarceration and growing deaths of despair on top of mounting climate disasters existential insecurity and pandemic emergency given the resulting desperation our forlorn present has triggered blunt expressions of what we might call time resistance like alicia worms leaves there are black people in the future placed recently in halting all cap white letters on a black billboard in pittsburgh pennsylvania as well as on various artistic objects sculptural pieces installations and in films worms leaves revolt against her peoples being defutured elaborated in a proleptic sense of the present impending a chronopolitics of prefiguration resonates with the ongoing battles over public monuments and their removals these highlight the otherwise suppressed violence of colonialism and slavery and their aftermath past and present conflicts over heritage inextricable from the very social production of the future which also index the stakes of documentary today ecologies of time are fraught and conflictual much like varieties of environmentalisms who has the right to produce the future radical futurisms have arisen in recent years to assert the means of production of the future articulated through speculative visions of times to come and this has to do with the current research project and book that i'm working on right now as witnessed internationally in the formation of creative creative practices pledged to decolonizing the not yet these rescue open potentiality from the grips of capitalism's algorithmic capture its technogenic determination its biosecurities of control building on the precedents of afrofuturisms of decades past when black sci-fi and musical experimentation projected an emancipated technological presence in years ahead as historicized and fictionally dramatized in black audio film collectives film the last angel of history from 1996 these practices now generate new configurations of documentary in multiple sectors including those of indigenous futurisms trans and queer futurisms multi-species and ecosocialist futurisms and still more they're also insistently intersection lists where ecologies form webs of entanglement that bear simultaneously on material circumstances environmental conditions and sociopolitical and economic relations entanglements that also lean on lessons of past environmental justice struggles that refuse to isolate natures from cultures in their culturally differentiated and historically specific formations another such modeling is black quantum futurism's documentary chronopolitics which materialize video assemblages and photo montages that unleash the forces of radical reversibility and retro causality they target time zones that keep racialized bodies locked in oppressive cells fortified by all manner of temporal encasements and holds unchanging pasts presence of indolence and criminality defutured voids of non-existence from these they break out there are 2019 video black space agency training video overlapping images blur into illegibility shapes mirror and mutate mimicking soundscapes filled with echoes and reverberations all emanating from a deep psycho environmental space of traumatic collective memory in what cedilla hartman terms the afterlife of slavery and in the recent past of housing segregation foregrounded as well in the experimental music of bqf member camey ayewa also known as more mother sonic elements perform deform and reform like their visual analogs as so many fugitive beings oftentimes ripped and perhaps liberated from appropriated sources of violence indeed summer sourced from deadly encounters with anti-black police brutality as with the sound piece the afterlife of events time distortion from 2016 with its torturous audio mixed with brutalist electronica representing sandra bland's violent arrest by police in texas before her suspicious death in jail in 2015 explains bqf we believe that astrological events are reversed and act retro causally from the cosmic future to influence present events that will be subsequently written on the fabric of the past by light and sound such as an eco temporal recipe for futurism's transfer transformative power in the present with black space agency and associated collages bqf graphs the techno optimism of past space travel dramatized in astronaut iconography and mirrored helmets reflecting black faces onto newspaper clips reporting unfulfilled house urban housing justice dreams resonating with the goals of bqf's community features lab in north philadelphia where member rashita phillips works as a housing rights lawyer their cultivation of space agency is juridical political geographical astronautical as much as environmental aesthetic and temporal indeed the challenge is how to constolate their pulsating lights and sounds to gain the future they want ripped from the contradictions of racialized inequalities in resource allocation as their video quotes dr martin luther king jr as valid today again think of the scandal of ilan musk as it was in 1966 he says there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live while the densely populated slums are allocated minuscule appropriations q gil scott heron's 1970 classic whitey on the moon those uneven spatio temporal geographies or also upended in cut hands reclamation resonating with the resounding world historical project of decolonization as demanded by indigenous formations like it'll know more and more recently the red nation for them decolonization represents the abolition of dominant economic arrangements and socio political systems organized around extraction and exploitation bringing to an end more than 500 years of colonial history and making way for futures of collective emancipation the video's performative power constructs its subjective viewership and emancipated people to come on land evacuated of oppressors a red nation rather than a red planet which bears on how solidarity might operate today particularly in settler colonial territories like north america including an artistic practice eave tuck and wane yang have argued that non-native solidarity with indigenous emancipation must avoid what they term settler moves to innocence or goodwill ally gestures that practice the metaphorization of decolonization by denying its essential meaning the return of land and sovereignty to indigenous peoples as if indigenous environmentalism would have much to do with decarbonization alone without anchoring those superficial gestures in the latter's radical meaning metaphorizing acts which facially extend decolonization to this or that whether decolonizing the university or sexuality as necessary as those also are problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity and rescue settler futurity in the words of tuck and yang ultimately for them settler accomplices can only accept an ethic of ins commensurability when it comes to solidarity which proposes an ecology of political belonging that means in their words relinquishing settler futurity abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to native peoples which in turn requires an understanding of uncommonality that uncoalesces coalition politics i'm aware that indigeneity proposes something maybe completely different in the british complex context where natalist citizenship can oppose xenophobic alienation but perhaps the radical politics of uncommonality might nevertheless have useful overlaps transnational accepting uncommonality leaves us recourse to alternatives like those presented in radical black praxis dedicated to the under commons as and uh and to a permanent fugitivity as elaborated by people like fred motin and stefan oharney where the refusal of property and possession of land as much as conventional subjectivities is the ethical truth of emancipated social experience and the only possible basis for decolonial solidarity that's exactly what cut ends radical futurism offers to non-indigenous viewers via documentary form a subjective non-place dispossession and permanent fugitivity and this precisely because the decolonized what's to come is devoid of settler colonialism's oppressive subjects with the video non-indigenous viewers experience their own disappearance they become accomplices in the abolishing of whiteness as a structure of racial division and colonial oppression that said one might argue conversely that demetaphorizing decolonization shouldn't dead end in the uncoalescing of coalition politics but rather reveal new pathways of solidarity on that basis indeed there's an urgent need for such alliances now more than ever given present hyper partisanship social media atomization and ethno-nationalist reaction and even with the recent win of joe biden and camilla harris in the us it's not going to put an end as many argue to those conditions that gave rise to trumpism in the first place uh this in order to build collective power to disrupt the constancy of colonial capitalist violence that harms us all if differentially sociopolitically and economically rating from yet another radical indigenous perspective uh nick estus of the red nation argues that indigenous futurity is and must be universal it isn't just for indigenous people it is essential for the very existence of life on the planet universal less in the eurocentric imperial sense but rather in the insurgent universality of for instance max tumba's recent work perhaps what's required for estus is a social revolution that turns back the forces of destruction uniting indigenous and non-indigenous people in common struggle against capitalism and colonialism alike instead of on or re-coalescing alliances of difference another option is building solidarity through differences abolition which documentary might also abet at this speculative limit is again the otolith groups film infinity minus infinity with denise ferrera de silva the artists speculate about a blackness beyond capture and infinity beyond infinity in the place of the subjectivity long denied to those of african diaspora by the european enlightenment modernity documentary is consequently keyed to a future indeterminate and ultimately uncaptureable zone of decolonized fugitive ferrera de silva discusses blackness as anti matter as negative life that is life that has the negative value instrumentalized historically by europe's universal measure in defining whiteness as its counterpart point and the height of self actualizing reason the latter fortified by racial oppositions gained through colonization and enslavement with all of the sociological economic and representational violences that were causing consequence of that inequality including a long history of documentary anthropology from its negative use value to a white reason and the dialectics of race blackness in ferrera de silva's deconstruction opens onto indeterminacy topologically connected to the infinite and uncontainable approximated in infinity minus infinity by turning the ears eyes and fingernails of figures into corp corp corporeal portals onto other worlds this is accomplished through a kind of biopolitical montage in which bodily orifices and surfaces provide screens of videos within videos a topology that reveals ever new scenes from the racial capitalist scene the geological epoch shaped by colonial capital and slavery offering a more precise descriptor than the Anthropocene with references to shang's radical choreo poetics also julia dash's cinematography specifically her four will four women video for women video set to the eponymous soundtrack by Nina Simone from 1974 and cedia hartman's writings on the coral as a mode of revolutionary collective dreaming and emancipatory storytelling infinity is an experiment ultimately in black feminist choreo poetics and i'd like to thank kojo eshin for sharing his thoughts on the piece with me defining the documentary of allegorical immensity the film culminates as its five-headed entity speculates about an eventual future resolve of liberation though only when those myths have been incorporated one into another and recognized as constituent parts of the before and afterlife of slavery and the never-ending colonial project one such constituent myth of this deep history is what chris manjapura has recently termed necrospeculation that is the economics of racial capitalism that records and manages the living dead surrounding post emancipation finance infinity cites her majesty's treasury and its infamous surprising friday fact tweet of february 9th 2018 that explained how millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes did you know in 1833 britain used 20 million pounds 40 of its national budget to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire the amount of money borrowed from the slavery abolition act it continues was so large that it wasn't paid off until 2015 which means that living british citizens helped pay to end the slave trade except they didn't the sum 17 billion in today's value was rather dispersed to compensate slavers for the loss of their human property paid by taxes including from those descendants whose ancestors survived slavery and distributed to more than 44441 slave owning claimants many likely the ancestors of today's political class and economically and the ready cash to carry out this necromantic transubstantiation of slaves that's again in manjapura's words slaves that are living absent and dead into money occurred through the rut the raising of a massive loan by the british government in 1835 that the british state continued to pay for almost two centuries ending only in 2015 not only was slavery not ended it continued in the notorious apprentice system of forced labor nor was the payout motivated by the ethics of abolition exactly but rather as a mode of racial capitalist speculation not surprisingly the tweet was deleted within hours yet of course its financial logic lives on transmuting into the so-called hostile environment used by the british government as part of its dissuasive anti-migrant and more exactly anti-black political economic military and cultural infrastructure as announced by teresa may in 2012 when she stated that her aim as home secretary under david cameron was to create here in britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration inspiring a broad and generalized anti-migrant legislative and administrative atmosphere in britain peaking with the wind rush scandal what i'm interested in here is uh with these projects is how their diverse approaches to aesthetic practice all disarticulate and reconfigure terms like atmosphere climate and environment as more than abstract categories of non-human natures instead they become insistently socio-ecological biopolitical necrospeculative speculative dense entanglements of politics economics and technology as much as biology chemistry and geology this is not a simple matter of political perspective or of a social art history of association and metaphor that draws distinct fields of meaning together rather it necessitates the practice of what donna harroway calls a sensible materialism where past colonial and extractive violence provide ongoing and determining forces within social life today forces that play a palpable role in defining the present in ways that can't be forgotten repressed or separated out without enacting epistemic violence as a site where aesthetics and environment cross sensible materialism grounds the analysis of intersectionalist ecology in her book in the wake on blackness and being christina sharp considers anti-blackness as total climate suggesting a resonant phase shift in the conceptualization of climate emergency today she points to the infamous history of the 1781 zong atrocity here represented by turners the slave ship from 1840 when that british ships captain opted to throw 130 slaves overboard and subsequently cash in on insurance claims after running low on drinking water on the open seas owing to navigational errors it's another socio-environmental example of necrospeculation where the human and the natural enter into financial speculation in her discussion of the case sharp references the science of what she calls residence time the period it takes a substance to enter and leave the ocean which for human blood and sodium is some 260 million years the songs past in other words is still very much present and for black black people everything is now it is all now she explains quote in tony morrison sharp's discussion provides a methodological lesson for environmental studies and thinking about terms like atmosphere and climate that helps avoid the emergency thinking that would abandon history in the production of a future oriented politics of environmental emergency for instance with some varieties of environmentalism today such as how and this brings to mind how groups like wretched of the earth have criticized extinction rebellion recently similarly when infinity utters the phrase i can't breathe the echoes spiral out in innumerable waves of anti-black police violence from eric garner's murder by police in 2014 to george floyd's in 2020 where vulnerability to premature premature death owes as much to racist police violence as to the disproportionate proximity of communities of color to toxicity and landfills and hazardous waste to inferior housing pestilence and urban impoverishment leading to pre-existing medical conditions we know from recent environmental justice sociology and breathing space that breathing spaces are racialized geographies and that race and class inequalities are experienced in elemental ways in relation to air water and soil where generally speaking blacks and whites actually breathe different air as lindsay dillon and julie c explained we also know from the scandal in flint michigan that they drink different water so how else to comprehend political ecology and its visual cultures in a present marked by the racialized deaths of breathlessness but through an intersectionalist ecology where there's nothing equal about access to air bodily security environmental health and resources where hostile environments themselves determine psycho geographies racial atmospherics climates of anti-blackness and white supremacy as well as ecologies of inequality we know that this is part of a long history of anthropocene biopolitics and necropolitics founded on the extraction of geopower for colonizers through slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples as kathryn use of states in infinity drawing on her book a billion black anthropocene or none and pursuing a line of questioning that is another form of sensible materialism she asks what does it mean when we say black lives matter what kind of matter are we talking about what histories of matter what kind of geophysics is this what color is the flesh of geology reverberating with cut hands reclamation as well as bqs multi-layered chronopolitics infinity minus infinity and its performative documentary ultimately proposes something like an abolitionist double negative both doing one catalyzing a disidentification not only from white supremacy but also from the very logic of racial difference and two compelling the nullification of the of those very systems the legal and economic institutions the techno social and educational infrastructure the effective and aesthetic practices that have reproduced the racial capital is seen historically and into the present it's only appropriate then that the otolith group in seeking to grant aesthetic form to this complex movement of a deeply historical futurism find recourse in the imagery of two black holes colliding creatively adopting a recent computer simulation from the california institute of technology that shows that awesome astronomical event detected for the first time ever by the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory roughly 30 times the mass of the sun each black hole contains a gravitational singularity wherein spacetime curves infinitely a natural force that leaves nothing as it was the film operates then in the spacetime between those two black holes after a past of unforgivable debt in the afterlife of slavery and facing a future filled with indeterminacy beyond reified difference its many portals reveal a not yet a radical disruption from a history that must be obliterated but never forgotten at its best current speculative documentary and more widely socio-environmental aesthetic practice unleashes cosmopolitical force and provides the building blocks forms events affects poetics of new worlds other environments wayward climates the challenge remains to organize the social movements to bring them into actuality thank you