 This is so exciting. We've been discussing your work for a long time now before you came here. And it's actually not that you're coming because you graduated from Columbia. So it's that you're coming back, right? And you're probably coming back to a different world. But one that you've been announcing with your work, I think that your work is more relevant now than ever and we can see now how much it was seen to your work and the way that you were reading reality in money. So it's really a joy to introduce you today and to welcome back, welcome you back to G-SAP or to Columbia you've been here for many years. But to G-SAP where your work has been so much discussed in the last years. I want to start by reading an excerpt from your book to the pages of my balcony, a love letter, the 2020 book. You might not have noticed, but the world, as we humans have known it, as we built it, is coming to an end and the world burns. As the world burns, we despair and rejoice, other worlds await. I think this is what makes your work so exciting that you're announcing how the world is sinking but there's other worlds that are emerging and that's what probably our work is now, really to make those, to accelerate the sinking of a world that we don't want and to allow those to emerge. Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, writer and researcher from New Orleans based between New Orleans and London, or in London now, right, rather than New Orleans. And for her I'd like to read more because I really love and I think we all love your writing. The projects of colonialism, genocide, slavery and fossil fuel production are faces of a single system of matter, wealth, culture, life and soul dislocation known as extractivism. Extractivism operates on bodies and fractal scales, at fractal scales, expanding from the scale of the cell the decomposed bacterium and the leaf of the three-cornered marsh grass to the scale of humans, oil fields and they'll take flood plains. Extraction from one body is simultaneously extraction from the ecological body. Extraction from anybody demands ecological solidarity and reparations. I think that this resounds with some of the most exciting work that has been done in the last years in the terrains of poetry, for instance, and I'm thinking of Audrey Lorde and the way that bodies and territories are simultaneously being the sides of destruction, exploitation and extraction. I think that your work is sewing through archival research, ecological philosophy, legal theory, people's history and counter cartographic strategy, the way spatial geologics have made geographies and make communities and eventually the break of the Earth's geology. And I think this is something that we as architects are part of, both personally and through our profession, and that basically it's the project that we have to undo and to confront now. You were the co-founder and artistic director from 2014 to 18 of the Blights Out collective in New Orleans, a collective of artists and architects who seek to then demystify and democratize development in the post-Catrina New Orleans. The project of Blights Out was the Living Glossary that I really love that spells out expanded definitions for how casual real estate and development terms. These simple concepts fill our language but the coded histories beneath their connotative meanings speak to a legacy of planned systemic oppression. Imani received her MA with distinction from the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmith University of London in 2019 and her BA in Anthropology and Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2010. Among other things, you're currently a PhD candidate at University of London, a research fellow with forensic architecture and an associate lecturer in the MA architecture program at the RCA, the Royal College of Arts. You were awarded or Imani was awarded in 2021 with the Black Women Green Future Award and in 2022 you presented and probably many of you saw it, this very impressive work, what remains at the ends of the earth at the 12th Berlin Biennale for contemporary art. Laura Kurgan is going to be responding to Imani after your lecture and it will be also a great moment. I know that there's so many connections between your work Imani and the work that Laura has been doing for the last decades and also the work that you're doing now, Laura, as director of the CDP program and to the studio center. So please join me in welcoming Imani here today. This is going to be a very exciting session for us. Some histories are cast in the light of a falling star that extinguishes the dinosaurs and gives rise to the dawn of capitalists, strange beasts that develop tools to segregate existence from itself and put us to work against our own interests. They drill 10,000 feet and 65 million years deep into subterranean oceans, black with soil, powers too great for the toolbearers to wield. They raise colonies of primordial bacteria from their slumber and put them to work, powering a trillion electric stars that are viewable from space but block the light of the old gas gods. That was when we were lost. In the beginning, there was oil, so red didactic tax at the New Orleans Audubon Aquarium until a few years ago when it was altered following numerous complaints. The text sought to contextualize the tank at the heart of the aquarium. You arrive at the tank after slowly descending through the building on a spiraling downward slope, passing enclosures, showcasing creatures and representing landscapes from around the world as well as the harm caused by human societies to those ecosystems, logging in the Amazon, seahorse fishing in China. Finally, you behold the centerpiece, a two-story tank representing the Gulf of Mexico, supported by the logos of Shell, Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil. At the center of a tank stands a strange structure. It's a scaled replica of an oil rig. The rig is circumnavigated by endangered sharks, stingrays and sea turtles. The exhibit is propaganda for the Federal Rigs to Reefs program, which permits oil and gas companies to leave thousands of defunct rigs standing in the ocean. They claim that the chemical-laden husks have become artificial reefs, beneficial to sea life. Unlike every other exhibit in the aquarium, here there is no mention of the deleterious impact of human activity on the Gulf ecosystem. There is no mention of the BP Deep Water Horizon oil spill, the largest in US history, which spilled five billion barrels of oil chased with toxic chemical dispersants, ravaging human and more than human ecological communities in Louisiana's coastal zone. Instead, there is this pernicious perpetuation of a quasi-biblical myth that oil is the source of everything we hold dear in Louisiana, that oil and gas built Louisiana. The politicians and corporations and institutions that pander this myth do so in full knowledge of the truth, that extractivism's cosmological guidelines have led us to the ends of the earth, that oil and gas has destroyed Louisiana. It is our responsibility to look beyond this imposed horizon to see for ourselves and ask what remains at the ends of the earth. This image is a picture of New Orleans, albeit captured from an unusual vantage. You might be able to just make out the city's signature landmarks, the dome of the Superdome, beneath a cloud of smog from a nearby wetland fire on the horizon. I captured this photo in January of 2022 from a three-passenger propeller plane, the flight of which was made possible by the nonprofit South Wings. This is also an image of Hurricane Katrina. Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29th, 2005, leaving 80% of New Orleans underwater, thousands of black folks stranded on their rooftops, 100,000 black folks permanently displaced from their homes, and 1,800 people dead. The storm revealed the underlying truth behind so-called natural disasters, that they're highly curated events. This image is a picture of Katrina because it reveals the more than meteorological forces behind that unnatural disaster. Before the city stretched our once-facund coastal wetlands, our ecological skin, the sole buffer between hundreds of more than human communities and the increasingly powerful and frequent hurricanes that roll in off the Gulf of Mexico. When Katrina hit New Orleans, this precious coastal geography had already been whiplashed and fragmented by 70 years of oil and gas extraction that led to one of the fastest rates of coastal erosion in the world, 2,000 square miles lost at a rate of one football field every 45 minutes. This is also a picture of the oil field, once one of the most productive sources of oil and gas in Louisiana. In the 1930s, when oil and gas was discovered in Louisiana's wetlands, oil companies searched for the most cost-effective ways to access the vast subterranean fields. But the wetlands got in the way. They were thick with mud and vegetation and carried themselves with a trickster energy. A patch of flotant appearing in one moment to be solid ground would transform to water in the next. Roads just couldn't hold up and musk rats nod away at wooden board rocks they tried to erect. So to help them, they decided to just cut their way on through. Since the 1930s, over 100 oil and gas corporations have dredged over 10,000 linear miles of canals in order to drill over 90,000 wells. Here you can see more clearly the architecture of access canals. After decades of land-to-water turnover, all that remains are the skeletal outlines of the canals, now uncannily suspended in open water by their spoil banks. Artificial levees formed when the dredge sediment was simply tossed to the side of the newly dredged canal. The high ground led to hypoxia and other forms of ecological degradation. Oil and gas canals allow saltwater to funnel in from the Gulf of Mexico into brackish and fresh water wetlands. The salt kills the vegetation that holds sediment together as land. Without that vegetation, the sediment simply disintegrates and floats out to sea. While healthy wetlands absorb the energy of hurricanes, slowing them down, draining their strength, these de-vegetated, desiccated wetlands are hit by hurricanes like a bomb. The canal on the right was exploded by the impact of Hurricane Ida, which hit on Katrina's 16th anniversary on August 29th, 2021. The disasters of extractivism roll out like sine waves one after the other. How and when does it end? From those 90,000 wells in the coastal wetlands, oil is pumped upriver through 50,000 miles of pipelines, which largely terminate 100 miles or so upriver in a region known to industry these days as the petrochemical corridor. Here, hundreds of the nation's most polluting petrochemical plants, refineries, and oil and gas storage tank farms straddle both sides of the Mississippi River. They occupy the fallow footprints of formerly slave-powered sugarcane plantations. The first nickname granted to this region was plantation country. This plant is the mosaic agroco-diammonium phosphate fertilizer plant. The products from this plant are trucked upriver to farms in America's bread bough, and they return to Louisiana in the form of runoff that forms one of the largest hypoxic zones in North America, a dead zone where little sea life can survive. Mosaic occupies part or all of six antebellum plantations and neighbors the small majority black descendant communities of Welcome and Lemonville, Louisiana. The residents are descendants of people formerly enslaved on those very grounds. The emissions of mosaics plan include ammonia and irritant of a skin and mucosal system, carcinogenic benzene and nitrogen oxides, and PM2.5, a respiratory irritant. In the 1980s, residents of the river parishes nicknamed their homeland Cancer Alley. So Louisiana's coastal wetlands bear the entirety of the fossil fuel production cycle. And here at its terminus, the petrochemical plantation contains all of the successive layers of violence of the continuum of extractivism. Extractivism is a system that was first imposed by French, Spanish, German joint stock companies maintained by their US American colonial successors and carried into the present by multinational oil and gas corporations. But extractivism is more than the systemic removal of resources from the earth or labor from human beings. It's a cosmology, a worldview that holds financial profit as the pinnacle of value. To accumulate the world, extractive agents must parcel or divide existence against itself. It applies a force of segregation to integral ecologies. Human beings are segregated from our wider ecological bodies. Black bodies are segregated from the body of humanity. Sugarcane production was historically so grueling that the plantations of the lower Mississippi dealt to bore a negative demographic birth rate among the enslaved population. Each plantation therefore required at least one and as many as three burial grounds to hold its dead. So as the plants in Cancer Alley toxify the air breathed by black descendant communities, it also crushes the remains of their ancestors. But sometimes these burial grounds survive and even thrive as new life. Groves of trees planted by the historically enslaved to mark the graves of their loved ones. We might think of these sacred groves as portals that enable us to traverse the continuum of extractivism and perhaps even reveal ways to rupture it, gesturing to other cosmologies that center other ways of being in the world. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, my family was displaced along with so many others and I eventually made my way to New York where I pursued my BA here at Columbia. The year I graduated, 2010, the BP oil spill erupted in the Gulf of Mexico. Residents spoke of the stench of oil in the air, slick in puddles of rain. Communities suffered cascading health problems. Species died off, disappeared, mutated. It felt as though the world hadn't ended during Katrina, but that it would finally end now. And yet again, life continued. The following year in New York, I experienced a personal rebirth as Occupy Wall Street erupted in Zuccotti Park. Then in 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the city and I participated in the Occupy Sandy relief effort, getting homes and supporting residents in Far Rockaway. I saw disaster capitalist vultures swooping in. I knew that I needed to return home to see what those same forces had done to New Orleans. And so I returned to a city filled with a housing crisis and 50,000 unoccupied so-called blighted homes. They were trapped in debtors prisons due to predatory blight finds levied by the city after Katrina in order to flip properties and gentrify the city. I co-founded a grassroots initiative, a collective of artists, activists and architects called Blights Out, but that's another story. Thus began my quest to uncover the layers of extractive violence and racial oppression that created the ground conditions, the racialized and sacrificed geographies inherited from colonialism and slavery that produced more than meteorological events like Katrina. In 2018, I founded an organization a festival called Fossil Free Fest. When I had returned to the city, I saw it wasn't just blighted with unoccupied homes. It was blighted by oil and gas logos that had been erupting upon the facades of our beloved arts, educational and science institutions. Jazz and Heritage Festival had become the Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell. French Quarter Festival was presented by Chevron. Satchmo Fests, Louis Armstrong's Festival presented by Chevron. The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts hosted the Chevron Forum and so on and so forth. I was working then as director of programs at Antenna, a small multi-arts organization and the then director, Bob Snead, a hero of mine, had the guts to say, let's do it. I had been dreaming of Fossil Free Fest for four years and in 2018, we realized it. It was truly courageous in the city that has next to no public funding for the arts. And so I started to organize my colleagues in the arts sector, speaking to so many administrators of organizations that were funded by oil and gas companies. And I was met with a lot of fear. People were afraid of just showing up, of being a part of a conversation, of being seen. They were afraid that their organizations would be defunded and closed. And so Fossil Free Fest tried to offer a space of togetherness, not of shame, but of working through these complexities, working through this complicity and recognizing that with complicity also comes the agency to revoke your complicity. In New Orleans, we recognize that times of transition, times like death, are best met with community and celebration. And so Fossil Free Fest aimed to follow in the footsteps of our great second line traditions, West and Central African funeral traditions, cultural retentions, by offering a space to celebrate the end of the fossil fuel era and locate ourselves within a just transition. What good is it if our buildings' lights are on but they're underwater? Who is truly benefiting from fossil fuel philanthropy if those people, those communities, most impacted by fossil fuel development, aren't part of those museums' publics? So amid food and music and performance and visual art, we held these difficult conversations. And I also had heard a lot of comments from my colleagues about the fact that, well, my oil and gas funded, my oil and gas funder is not one of the most responsible for environmental degradation in Louisiana. And I knew that evidence to the contrary existed but that I needed to develop new tools to mobilize that knowledge. And so I moved to London to pursue my MA in research architecture at Goldsmiths Center for Research Architecture. At Goldsmiths, I started digging into the state archives in Louisiana that revealed the origins of our cultural myths like oil and gas built Louisiana. And my research brought me to this concept of the continuum of extractivism but it wasn't just a figment of my imagination. It's encoded in the state's own archives. So here's the continuum of extractivism in the state's own words. In a 1938 issue of the Louisiana Conservation Review, a magazine produced by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, which manages the state's mineral resources. And it reads, the first chapter in the romantic history of natural gas in Louisiana begins with a picture of 15 husky negro slaves laboriously toiling under a crude tripod on the banks of Cane River at Bermuda, 10 miles south of Nacodish in North Louisiana. And I worked with long-term friend and co-conspirator Scott Eustis of Healthy Golf to learn how to access the state's permit records through the database of Louisiana's Department of Natural Resources. And so here are pages from the permit application for an oil and gas access canal dredged by the Colonial Pipeline Company, which just about says it all. Environmental lawyer Oliver Hooke notes that it's difficult to see the vast scale of ecological destruction from the ground. In a canoe or a piero, you pass the a tongue of brown water that just seems as innocent as can be. And it's only when you ascend in a small plane or in a satellite image that the expanding horizon of canals comes into view. And so to comprehend both the spatial and temporal scales of violence, we need to adopt a diverse ways of seeing and sensing the world around us. Through satellite imagery, I learned to adopt a bird's eye or an ancestor's eye point of view. Using Google Earth Pro, I learned how to navigate satellite imagery for the first time, locating my pre-Katrina home and then following my line of sight out to the expanding horizon of canals. As a local, this way of seeing expanded my own bodily awareness, my awareness of my ecological body. So years before Healthy Golf and South Wings offered me the wonderful opportunity to see my home from a propeller plane, I first learned to see through the eyes of a satellite. But I knew that this image was incomplete, begging more questions and answering them. Where are the mechanical apparatuses that led to this coastal land loss? And if this land has been lost, well, who lost them? So the coordinate lines and points from the Department of Natural Resources Permit Database were spatialized as GIS lines and points. And I downloaded them into QGIS, which is a free open source geographic information system software. These shape files were available for public download until April, 2021, when the files inexplicitly vanished. I spent hundreds of hours, most of 2020, organizing these lines and points by company. And you can see a few of them here. There are over a hundred companies there, but a lot of them have actually merged or been acquired by other corporations. So if we wanna think about corporate accountability, we actually have to know not just who the pipelines and canals and wells were permitted to, but who are the operators today? So I spent a lot of time using the best available data in order to research the succession of oil companies. And something that I like to say when I'm in the UK, because I think they'll understand it, is much like the crown, oil and gas companies don't die, they merely are succeeded. So the result of all of that work is follow the oil, an online mapping platform that aimed to bring satellite viewing to a broad public, to explain the process and impacts of fossil fuel production on more than human ecologies and to reveal those corporations responsible. So what you're seeing here is a small excerpt from the platform's scrolling narrative. And it maps all of the generalized oil and gas wells, as well as pipelines. And it also uses corporate logos from carbon, for all the carbon majors to plot all of their wells. And I see these corporate logos as flags. The flags are planted across cities like New Orleans on our cultural institutions, trying to claim the conquest and responsibility for our beloved institutions. But there is a place where they more properly belong and that's on these sites of devastation. This is the land that has been conquered and colonized. So here we can see how plotting the canals and pipelines and wells enables us to see some of this subsurface geology. The oil and gas actually pools around the perimeters of subterranean salt domes. And here in what's known as the Chevron wagon wheel, formerly the territory of Texaco, which was succeeded by Chevron, they tried to find the most cost effective way to access that oil and so they experimented with dredging canals in a circular formation around the perimeter of the salt dome. And then following the oil from to the Chevron wagon wheel through a pipeline, we arrived back at the Lafitte oil field, which is where the presentation began. And here we take a look at some permits for oil and gas wells as well as for pipelines. This permit was issued for a mere $50, probably a really great return on their investment there. And from here, I was able to access data on the actual production stats from a sample of 250 wells. There are over 500 wells owned by Chevron today in this oil field. And by comparing the barrels of oil produced over a 20 year period from each well with the value, the dollar value of oil, the barrel of oil at the time, adjusting it for inflation, I was able to calculate the dollar value of oil extracted from that sample of 250 wells over a 20 year period. And attempted to visualize it in a way that would make it a bit more, make this very abstract figure a bit more tangible. So from those 250 wells over a 20 year period, $27 billion worth of oil was extracted. So this figure just gives us a small glimpse into the vast quantities of wealth extracted from Louisiana's wetlands over time. It's not actually a calculation of profit. For that we need to know the company's expenses and I would be very happy to receive that information. So the platform narrative ends with the concept of unjust enrichment, which is an equitable principle that says that if one entity, a corporation or a person profits from activities that impoverish another entity, those profits are unjust and must be restituted. So ending here, I wanted to offer up unjust enrichment as an operational concept for us to understand what has been done to us but also a way out. One of the major problems with reparations claims is this question of well, how much is owed? So the folks usually focus on damages. What was the harm done and how do we quantify it? The problem is that human rights atrocities and environmental violence are unquantifiable. How do you calculate the value of a human life? How do you calculate the value of complex ecosystems that we don't even fully understand? You can't. And so unjust enrichment puts the focus on profit rather than on damages. How much was extracted? That's what's owed. So in 2018, a new plant decided to jump on the Cancer Alley Bandwagon for most of plastics. Announced plans to construct a 3.5 square mile plastic nerdles production facility across four antebellum plantations in St. James Parish County in Louisiana. A nerdle is a plastic pellet, the smallest unit of plastic production. And I am gonna let the amazing Sharon Levine introduce this next work. My name is Sharon Levine. I'm the director and founder of Rise St. James right here in St. James Parish. And we are here to commemorate the graves of our enslaved ancestors. We gonna stand together. And we gonna fight for most of, we will not allow them to take our ancestors out of this ground and put them somewhere else. We are Rise St. James and we gonna stand up for St. James Parish. This is our home. We're not going anywhere. Formosa have a fight on their hands. So as soon as Formosa announced its plans, Rise St. James member Gail LeBuff said, there are graves on that property. And so they organized with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Pam Spees is here actually in New York. And an archeologist with Coastal Environments, Inc. in order to try to see if those graves could actually be located. So Don Hunter with Coastal Environments, Inc. reviewed the cartographic record and actually found three mapped cemeteries on that property. It's actually quite amazing that these three cemeteries were found all in a row on these maps for reasons that'll become clear a bit later. And Forensic Architecture, Human Rights and Environmental Violence Investigative Agency based in London, based at Goldsmiths, invited me to initiate an investigation into Louisiana. So I didn't know where to even start. I mean like the ecological crisis we're facing is quite large. There are many possible entry points. So I convened a group of residents of St. James, including members of Ry St. James. They're legal advocates from a number of organizations. And we put our heads together and it was very clear that the burial grounds were the place to start. So Ry's and the Center for Constitutional Rights challenged Forensic Architecture to develop a methodology for locating antebellum black burial grounds across a wide region prior to industry announcing a new project and breaking ground. And so we selected a 60 kilometer area spanning parts of Ascension, St. James and St. John the Baptist. Parishes is our focus area. And we pulled data from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality on six toxic and criteria air pollutants with impacts of human health to start to paint a picture of the contemporary situation. Those pollutants are ammonia, benzene, chloroprene, chloroprene, ethylene oxide, nitrogen oxides and PM 2.5. And working with Imperial College, London unfortunately named, but they do great work. They're world leaders in fluid dynamics. We produce a simulation of the movement of those six pollutants across space and time. And we modeled three separate days each with distinct prevailing wind conditions in order to reveal which communities were caught in the plumes' paths. So majority black communities in the Fifth District, where Sharon Levine and other members of Rise Live were disproportionately impacted. The predominant wind direction blew the plumes directly over their communities. But the simulation also revealed something else, something that Sharon Levine likes to say which is that toxic air does not obey geopolitical borders. Everyone gets caught in the toxic plumes. So sometimes the wind blows the plumes north toward the state capital of Baton Rouge. And sometimes it blows them south toward New Orleans. And sometimes the majority white communities have voted against the construction of plants in their own backyards, but did not oppose the construction of plants in majority black communities are also caught in the toxic clouds. And so from there, we needed to travel back in time in order to trace the foundations upon which this industry stands and locate the burial grounds at risk from future industrial development. And so we sourced visual materials spanning 140 years, beginning with post-bellum coast surveys of the region. With all of the materials, we geo-referenced them, meaning that we pinned their coordinates to the coordinate grid and contemporary satellite images. So these two maps are from 1878 and 1894. And there's a lot to say about what it means that they are post rather than anti-bellum, but we perhaps can save it for conversation. So the surveys depict riverside plantations in surprising detail. And we studied and traced all of the lines that were encoded therein. We traced the plantation borders and field paths, the sugar mills and slave quarters, and noted when on two dozen occasions, burial grounds are mapped, albeit with an inconsistent symbolic logic. And yet with hundreds of plantations in the region, each necessitating one to three burial grounds, we knew that there were many holes in the historic record that needed to be filled. And so our analysis of the typological organizational logics, where is the slave master's big house in relation to the sugar mill, in relation to the slave quarters, enabled us to hypothesize where missing burial grounds were likely to be located. And then we continued our progression back toward the present by sourcing six decades of aerial photography. So we geo-referenced them as well and created a portal that allows us to move back and forth in time, revealing both the permanence of the organizational logics inscribed into the earth by colonialism and slavery, as well as the transformations of the land over time as industry became increasingly heavy. And so by comparing historical maps with these aerial and satellite images, we could see how the symbolic representation of plantation cemeteries approximates the actual topography. So this is the Homer's plantation cemetery, which is named after the indigenous Homer people who were dispossessed from this territory and pushed to the disintegrating edges of land. The oval shape here matches onto the grove of trees. So today this property is owned by Shell Oil Company. They own the Shell Convent Refinery on the adjacent three or four plantations. And in 2013, they plan to expand those facilities onto this neighboring land. And so they conducted a federally mandated archeological survey, but they made a mistake. They hired Coastal Environments, Inc., the same firm that was later to work with Rye St. James to identify plantation cemeteries on Formosa's property. They hired the one firm among the rash of for-profit archeological firms who actually care about history and people. So Coastal Environments, Inc., in partnership with Environmental Resource Management, located this burial ground, along with two others on the property. They identified the people and tarred their in and estimated that there were around a thousand people buried there. And they also analyzed the trees on site and concluded that the trees are partly the remains of the primordial forest, which was clear to make way for fields of cane, but there's also something else going on there. So first, just to establish why it is that we see this grove of trees surrounded by fields of sugarcane. Sugarcane is a crop of scale. And so over the decades, as a planter's wealth increased, fields were slowly cultivated from the edge of the river on back to the backswamps, cultivated by enslaved hands, clearing the forest, where enslaved people buried their dead. So as the forest receives, the burial ground becomes an island lost amid seas of cane. So the groves are a remnant of the primordial forest, but they're also more than natural. Enslaved people planted specific species of trees, magnolias and willows, in order to mark the graves of their loved ones. And the archeological report suggests that the trees on site today are actually the descendants of trees that were planted by the historically enslaved. So whenever a grove of trees or other topographical information, formations, interrupts the otherwise seamless tapestry of sugarcane fields, archeologists call it a topographical anomaly. And so in the 1940s aerial mosaic, we identified over 1,000 groves of trees. This is a selection of six that are highly likely to be antebellum black burial grounds based on their relative location on the plantation. These six have all been destroyed by industrial activity, whether ongoing plowing or petrochemical development. By the 2021 satellite images, only 350 or so of those groves remained. Now it's important to say that not all groves of trees are going to be burial grounds. Sometimes vegetation traces the ruins of the slave quarter and sugar mill complex. Those ruins are also incredibly valuable, cultural and historic properties that can teach us a lot about our history and our culture in Louisiana. And they also deserve protection. But some of them are likely to be burial grounds. And this process of erasure affects human communities as much as their cultural resources, such as the historic black free town of Lyons. That was a small rural community until the encroachment of Marathon Petroleum Corporation and Cargill Inc, which has completely surrounded the community, left all, erased all but five homes, and has surrounded two cemeteries that were likely in both antebellum and postbellum use. And actually Marathon Petroleum owns a portion of one cemetery. So this work with forensic architecture has been mobilized by local residents in their legal efforts to block the construction of Formosa, South Louisiana Methanol, the Greenfield Development, and other industrial properties. This is an excerpt from an affidavit that we filed on behalf of the Descendants Project and their lawsuit against an industrial grain elevator that would cross several antebellum plantations and actually stand taller than the Statue of Liberty. And actually recently, I should say, in March of this year, the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Ry St. James and Inclusive Louisiana actually filed a legal complaint demanding a moratorium on all industrial development in St. James Parish. It was filed in federal court. So it's really exciting and I look forward to seeing where that goes. And in fact, there is hope because in September of last year, a Louisiana judge actually quoted Sharon Levine and reaffirmed her perspective on land worked by historically enslaved people as being sacred and deserving of protection. So Sharon Levine of Ry St. James explained, these are sacred lands. They were passed down to black residents from their great, great, great grandparents who worked hard to buy these lands to make them productive and pass them on to their families. The court further unpacks the meaning of these are sacred lands. The blood, sweat, and tears of their ancestors is tied to the land. And so Sharon's recognition of the sacred quality of land carries forward the beliefs of her historically enslaved African-American ancestors. The forests in the back swamps at the margins of antebellum plantations across Louisiana were always spaces of freedom, temporary autonomous zones. Ex-slave narratives testify to enslaved people retracing the paths of their daily toil, crossing miles of sugarcane fields in the embrace of the night to perform ritual and dance in the forest, sneaking back to their quarters before morning roll call. In the forest, they exchanged food and secrets with self emancipated black folk, also known as maroons, who founded infamous villages all throughout the swamps, not just in Louisiana, but all across the deep South, all across the Americas. They inspired a wealth of folklore. The forested back swamps were freedom lands in part because they were feared by the settler colonists who could not control them. They saw them as wastelands infested by alligators and swamps and made every effort to drain them and log them into submission, but it didn't work. So burial grounds are precious survivals of those forests, those freedom lands, and they're also carefully cultivated micro-ecologies. And slave people did not simply plant those trees as grave markers for lack of stone. They planted those trees in order to carry on these West and Central African ecological praxis that emerged from cosmologies that said that ancestral spirits reside in the crowns of trees. Those praxis adapted to the forests of the Americas, syncretizing with indigenous belief and knowledge. A world's forest and ecological diaspora blooms into being, uniting Louisiana with Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Dahomey, Congo, and beyond. In collaboration with their human descendants, more than human sacred groves hold down the front lines of resistance against the perpetuation and expansion of the petrochemical corridor. Trees extend their roots, garnished in mycelial threads to revitalize lands stagnated by monocrop agriculture. They extend their leaves and branches, resuscitating air asphyxiated by industrial pollutants. And they do their humblest to pull down the carbon dioxide that is propelled by these plants against the world's horizon. To say that the land on which enslaved people were worked to death as sacred is not merely to speak of the Fermaterra that holds their enterred bodies. Transfenon wrote that, for a colonized people, the most important value is land, for it offers bread and dignity. Yet, for land to bestow dignity upon colonized human beings, the dignity of the land must be defended and honored. Thus the word land is merely a placeholder for the fullness of our integrated ecological systems. As the soil is sacred, so are the trees that hold sediment together as land. So are the mycelial threads that weave the roots of trees together, passing messages between them. So is the air that is produced by the leaves of those trees. And so are the living human beings that breathe the air produced by the leaves clinging to the trees whose roots hold the land together. Swamps everywhere are involved in cycles of becoming otherwise. Life becomes death and death begets life. Soil and water ebb and flow and everything mixes in the murky light. So there's a reason why the marshlands born of riverine deltas from Iraq to Egypt to Nigeria to Louisiana are cradles of biodiversity and of civilizations. Before colonists enslaved her and erased her given name 300 years ago, Louisiana was known as Bulbancha, meaning land of many languages in Mobillion, a unifying trade dialect of Choctaw. The vibrations of shared language wove together over two dozen indigenous nations who gathered in the Mississippi River Delta in New Orleans to trade. The Mobillion language speaks to the heart of Louisiana. It reminds us that she is a place of convergence, integration and flow. For 300 years colonialism has forced us to settle, to be stiff and still, to resist the deltas imperative to flow and change. The time for change is now. If segregation is the productive force of the cosmology of extractivism, then we need cosmologies grounded in ecological reintegration. What remains at the ends of the earth is ecological reparations, not just humans, but whole ecosystems conspiring, which means to breathe together. Today across Louisiana, residents refuse quick profit and false solutions and they prefer to ask, what does it mean to continue the work of our ancestors? Thank you. Thanks, Emani, was, you know, I've heard you give this as a 20 minute talk and this was what, an hour? I think it could be two hours. I think people could listen to you talk forever. I don't know if you all agree, but you know, just this last part where you were saying that Louisiana was called the land of many languages. You're speaking so many languages in the way that you deliver this talk. And I think that that's what's so sort of overwhelming and hard to respond to in one. And also it's one project, you know. So I love the way that you narrate your trajectory and the urgency with which you then took on, you know, going further and digging deep and very deep and very high up into the sky for these, in this one particular, in this one particular site. And then also, you know, I have seen, I can't describe to you how many maps I've seen of the oil fields and the wells and the pipelines in that particular region of Los Angeles. And there's a certain amount of images that also, that always say ecological justice or environmental justice and petrochemical, the petrochemical district. That's one of them. There've been a lot of maps drawn in. Lindy is sitting right there in front of me and Kate Orff and many, many, many people. But the way that you did it that brings accountability to it, it was just so smart. Just not only drawing the lines but assembling the data and excavating the data, which is not easy to do, right? And as we all know, and especially forensic architecture, data doesn't speak for itself, you have to. And so I think that the way you started there with the expenses being this unjust enrichment which then must be restituted. And then from there going, you know, into the burial grounds and the trees which are the markers and not knowing exactly who was buried and how and that these trees are on private lands. And I don't know, you can just, you can really, really go on forever. So, and then it all comes together in this affidavit, in this affidavit that you've sent out which might or might not bring the results that you're asking for. But you're asking so many different layers, layers of things, I just wanna, I don't know, congratulate you, I don't even have, I really don't have questions, you know, because I think it's all so well drawn out. So, I don't know, I would prefer, I think, maybe just that there's an amazing audience on this side with really great faculty and I have some amazing students here as well. And I think everybody might have questions to sort of, just to sort of open it up, especially in your methodology, in terms of your methodology and how you hope, maybe I can ask a question. I'll ask one, because I just learned that you're doing a geography PhD, which I think is such a great idea. We were talking about it a little bit before the audience showed up. And I think that is a really great way of continuing your research. So, are you thinking of continuing this to other sites, like you were saying, Haiti, the Congo? Yeah, what are you planning to do just in terms of your PhD? And the other question, so that's one question, and the other question is, how did this thing start? Because you were already doing work in New Orleans and then you said forensic architecture commissioned you to do the work about, but where did it start? Did the idea start with you, or did somebody come to them? How did that, so those two questions, and then we'll open it up. Sure, so to start with the second question, I guess. So forensic architecture always tries to work by invitation, they like to stay in their lane. So they like to have someone from an affected community come to them with a case and ask them to work on it. Or the victim's family or lawyers, for example. So I actually, I went to London, I learned about forensic architecture in 2014 at a conference in Cuba that I attended and it was not long after I left New York. And so I wrote this paper kind of reflecting on Occupied Wall Street from my vantage in New Orleans and I went to Cuba and went to this conference and the conveners suggested that I look at forensic architecture and I hadn't been familiar with them before. And so I started dreaming and scheming about them conducting an investigation into any of this like vast array of human environmental atrocities, right? And I never expected that it would be me actually doing that. But I went to the master's program and I just kind of kept pushing, my master's work was mapping the pipelines and wells and I just kind of kept pushing it at Eagle, Weisman, the director, look over here. And so I was brought on, I was asked to, I was recruited by forensic architecture in part to do work on the investigation into police brutality against Black Lives Matter protesters during 2020 and then invited to launch an investigation into something in Louisiana. And so that's how that got started. So they knew about their, it's yeah, that's great. In terms of the PhD, so yes, it's a PhD in geography which I chose in part as I was saying before because I wanted a really legitimate sounding degree because I love the interdisciplinary creative work and I also have been engaging with the legal sphere recently which is very stiff and kind of very linear in thinking in a lot of ways. And so actually that affidavit, I delivered testimony to that affidavit to a St. John the Baptist Parish Court remotely last June and it was really intense as I guess it would always be but getting tendered as an expert witness was really difficult. So I knew I needed to do a PhD and I wanted to have a PhD that was just like very easily understandable but I'm doing it with Catherine Youssef and so she's very creative and open and so I feel like I'm still able to work in the same way. And yes, so all of my work, it's just I've just kind of been, I've been moving along this path and I don't know what's going to come next but the research that I do with the people I am in community with, one thing just kind of leads to the next and so I want to continue from the grounds of these burial grounds and really trace this practice of planting trees across the African diaspora. And so what I've learned already, it's really fun and what I've learned already is that these groves when I say that they could be considered sacred groves, like that's a term for these groves of trees across the continent all across like four corners of the continent but also certainly west and central Africa where the majority of enslaved people in Louisiana came from, sacred groves are these spaces that will hold alters and serve as ritual space and are protected. They are indigenous conservation spaces and they're only one of a kind of vast constellation of different types of ecological practices that stem from like this diverse array of cosmologies and they have a lot of things in common including this belief that spirits are held in the crowns of trees. So I'm basically tracing human and tree relationships from Louisiana back to Haiti so 10,000 people migrated from Haiti via Cuba to Louisiana after the Haitian Revolution really influencing Vodou in New Orleans and in Louisiana in general and then back to west and central Africa so looking to the places where enslaved people in Louisiana and Haiti were extracted from so Senegal via being a major place, Benin, Togo, Congo, Angola, this area. So I have to figure out how to narrow it down. It's hard, it really sounds like needles in the haystack so you really have to find a site that you know has not only the history but where the houses were and anyway, it's gonna be amazing. It's exciting and it's the site research, I mean like that's gonna be the most amazing bit but even like the, trying to figure out what are my archives? Because they're not gonna be consistent, yeah. And I've been reading Sadio Hartman's Lose Your Mother and just really wondering whether her path is my path, like the violence of the colonial archive, thinking on the one hand that well, maybe there like trees are present in these archives but they've been overlooked and should I go through all of that? Should I put myself through that in order to try to find traces and I've been increasingly thinking well actually, perhaps the archives of this project are folklore, X-Lave narratives which are extremely valuable, very heart-wrenching as well. Looking into spiritual practices so I was just in New Orleans and I met with a Yorubin priestess in New Orleans, Mama Sula and I was telling her a little bit about this project and I mentioned the Oroko Tree which is considered sacred in West Africa and she immediately started singing this song about the Oroko and the Oroko Tree and the, but one would kind of casually and incorrectly call deities that are associated with the Oroko Tree translate in Haiti to the silk cotton tree and Oroko becomes Papaloko and so there's, anyway, so it's been fascinating. I mean, I've been finding, there's so much in these types of archives and it's very revitalizing to go through this process of discovery or recovery of this knowledge. Okay, I'm gonna open it up. Yeah, okay. First, Yvonne, and then, sorry, what's your name? Well, many thanks for, yeah. Okay, many thanks for this incredible lecture. I think it was an incredible project. And my question is very much related to this last part of your answer in a way. I'm precisely to, even Saidiya Harman's approach even to what the archive could be. You show an incredible amount of documents. Sometimes there were plans, sometimes there were photographs of Hidaybids, but also just like, for example, oral histories in a way or other kind of narratives. And my question would be, how do you approach this different nature of what evidences could be and what kind of knowledge also could be not extracted, but how could be entangled with the other knowledges and the other narratives that you are showing in a way. Thank you. Yeah, so I guess one thing that I didn't say during the presentation that's really important to say is, so all of these historical maps, they contain a lot of information, but they're also just, it's full of holes. It's more a hole than fabric, really. And they can be read. They can learn about these colonial logics, but even that is incomplete. And it has to be fleshed out with the knowledge held by local communities, by the genealogists who have been trying to recover some of the knowledge that has, we can say has been lost. I wouldn't quite say a race, but the state has actively neglected local knowledge as to the locations of these burial grounds for decades, century. And such, and there are people's historians like Mr. Leon A. Waters who carry a lot of this knowledge and carry a lot of knowledge from their forebearers, as well as documents and have a ton of documents and papers that, and so there's a lot of collaboration that goes into this work, a lot of dialogue, a lot of knowledge sharing in all directions, right? So not extractive because it's very reciprocal. And so it was interesting actually because we conducted some remote interviews with Mr. Waters in 2020, 2021 when we were doing this research and it was during COVID. And so it was a funny time to do this project because of course I would have loved to have been home and on the ground, but that just wasn't possible. So we were experimenting with different types of interview processes and it gave us the opportunity to also share some of this knowledge about how to use satellite imagery. And so Mr. Leon is an elder and so we thought a lot about, okay, how do we orient him within the satellite imagery? This is a landscape that he knows intimately, you know? And so like reorienting to that aerial perspective and he was a really quick learner, but it was an interesting and fun process and so we shared, he wanted to get access to the original files of the maps which are massive and so we could print them out and so we shared them with him. And now we're in the final stages of translating all of the maps and aerial photography, basically that entire portal or GIS file into an online public platform so that it can be a very useful research tool for local residents, activists, genealogists, lawyers and so on and so forth. So very much like, and the final step is creating a GitHub repository for all of these archival documents that we went through, you know, X-slave narratives, slave schedules, mortality schedules, all of these documents that exist somewhere on the internet but are massively dispersed. The X-slave narratives come from a WPA project in the 1930s and 40s and they were all supposed to be housed with the Library of Congress, but in classic fashion, the Louisiana documents never made it to the Library of Congress and they were in somebody's house, in some boxes and various institutions around the country like hoard them in their own little archives and so just bringing all this material together in one place to make it easier for people to do their own research, with their own agendas, find their own people and so on. And I think there really is, I'm trying to think about what, bringing voices into that because the map stays very flat, right? And so as we're developing that platform, it's very much in dialogue with especially the Descendants Project these days, Joy and Joe Banner and trying to make sure that the narrative is reflective of how they want the story to be told and that was all done during the FA investigation as well. So the whole video, there's a 35 minute investigative film online and we went, we made that video, we storyboarded it and went through it, we got feedback, critique, changed things and then also co-wrote the final, the conclusion of that video with local residents. So those are all their voices and perspectives that culminate the film. Yeah. Hi. I wanna thank you so much for this fascinating and beautiful and really powerful lecture and I also wanna thank you for using personal ethnography to guide us through this whole research journey and I found that really powerful and I think that's a wonderful surprise for me to learn that you study anthropology and I collaborate heavily with anthropologists and one thing I learned from them was a kind of struggle that so many of them through field research just doing these kind of socio-ecological justice work but then still limited to access to archival footages and images that has a lot of bias from the image making from a particular period of particular persons, a collective who made the images. So I can totally kind of understand your journey almost going through anthropology and then the map making or spatial studies and then geography. Sorry, my mind's everywhere and this one point you talk about people's relationship with trees also from my previous research in this Tibetan town in southwest China, one of the rare preserved forests is actually where the Tibetan Buddhists do the burial ceremonies and that was something about the spirituality that you also talk through your research. So back to my question. What is the kind of I guess impact through studying anthropology into the kind of spatial research because I feel I can see the influences of the earlier research but I just wanna kind of hear what's the kind of points you picked up on the cross disciplinary studies? It's an interesting question. Thanks for asking. I don't know that I've been asked it before so I'm gonna try to answer because I don't know how easy it is to disentangle all the threads but I think really carefully about what it means to be in community and work with community and I think this isn't really just informed. I don't know that it originated with anthropology but I think it's something that in anthropology there's a history of the field that had to be completely canceled and reimagined of this kind of extractive mode of knowledge and knowledge as resource extraction, this kind of objectification of others and the researchers standing outside of the community that they're researching and speaking about them and then trying to somehow comprehend and translate cultures that have been developed over the course of however many centuries and millennia and are just so incredibly complex and embedded and embodied. And I think so I guess this and I think contemporary anthropology has been really trying to work through this legacy and find another way and so this is just I guess kind of ever present with me and I guess there's a lot more in contemporary anthropology, there's a lot more of this, the research subject is myself and so I feel my work is very much, I guess it can be considered yeah, like a personal ethnography in a way. I feel like I make sense of the world, we all make sense of the world through our own experience, through our own body and so yeah, as I was saying, I found it really meaningful, like very strangely meaningful to be in this remote position in London and studying my home and learning so much about my home and myself because of that distance, right? Thinking about ecological diathlete, realizing the more I'm away from New Orleans, the more I realize how New Orleans I am and when I'm somewhere else, I really feel, I've never felt more, I've never felt American when I lived in the US and now that I'm not I feel so American and so it's thinking about how you really, you are the place that you are from or in for a long period of time, you're literally breathing the air and eating the food and drinking the water and absorbing the cultural rhythms and so you become the place that you're in and so I think this kind of move between anthropology and spatial research is very much that kind of recognition of like, yeah, I am a part of a geography, I am also a geography, I am a part of an ecology, one body within a larger kind of ecological body and yeah, so that's just what I've been trying to, I've been, and when I am not in that place, that place is still with me and I still therefore have, it's like quantum entanglement, right? You're still connected with the place that you're from even though you're not there and asking well, what then is my responsibility to that place over the long term? Could I ever fully leave it behind? And so I think that's also been a major driver of my work is feeling very dedicated to Louisiana and yeah, I'm not wanting to abandon it because I've had the privilege, the immense privilege of being able to travel around the world, so. Questions? Thank you so much. I wanna frame this question a bit in terms of the history of just transition as oscillating between like the poles of reform and revolution and I want to ask often at times, going out of like a purely juridical model, like just transition becomes quite confrontational and in this sense, maybe the short version of this question I wanna ask is what do you say to the Chevron executive who doesn't accept the cosmology of Western Central African spirituality? And I mean, in a larger sense, many of us are going to be in a situation where we will be negotiating with these people who do not accept those cosmologies. So how do we, like, do you have any advice for how we negotiate that? And perhaps, you know, what stops us from arriving in conclusion that the only response is truly revolution? I would love to talk to the Chevron executive. If you have a contact. I actually try to reach, I try to connect with the Chevron archive somewhere in California and I guess they've looked me up and they have stopped communication with me. But yeah, I mean, I think it's a really interesting question because on the one hand, we could assume that, so certainly, okay, Western Central African cosmology, they probably, they may or may not have any connection with but the central tenets of these cosmologies of a sense of home, what is your home? How do you define that? What are its parameters? Everyone has some kind of connection to a place that they call home. It might be a very complicated and fraught connection as well. And how do we start to move from there to understanding a wider kind of conception of home and how to protect it, right? I don't know what the, I wouldn't know what the Chevron CEO thinks or feels until I could actually connect with him or her or they, but it's interesting because in Louisiana to bring it back home a little bit to the people that I am connected with and know a little bit better, there are, we really, Louisiana is proud or has been, maybe it might have started to change a little bit but Louisiana has been proud of our oil and gas development. And I've been learning a lot about the historical process of creating that oil and gas citizen, like how these Fisher communities were turned into corporate towns. How did the festival, Morgan City, Louisiana Festival, the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival come to be, right? And back when Texaco was first creating company towns and trying to buy out people's lands and rights of way on their land to lay pipelines in the early days, these Cajun Fisher folk were out there with shotguns, trying to keep them off their property. And state biologist Percy Viosca said in the 1930s that oil and gas development was changing the conditions of existence from its very foundations. And so then something was happening in the 1950s to 1970s when this resistance, this local resistance started to break down. And I'm not, maybe it's the money that was flowing in, maybe it's that these traditional ways of being had been so broken because oil and gas development had already, through salt brine pollution and wetland degradation, had already started to break these ecosystems down so that people could no longer make a living through fishing and oyster fishing and other types of muskrat trapping and other types of traditional economy. And so that kind of, that economic pressure changes people and it takes time and it takes generations. And so people are now kind of looking back and some folk are wondering like how did we get here? And in the face of this massive coastal land loss where Louisiana has now built a wall around New Orleans, this massive sea wall to protect it from rising seas and hurricane flood storm surge. And of course there are communities on the wrong side of those walls. And so people, I had this conversation with environmental journalist Bob Marshall recently where he was saying, yeah, like how do you, what do you say to the industry workers? There's a lot of cynicism these days of people saying, yeah, it's a shame what's happened, but what else are we gonna do? There's nothing to be done. So we might as well just push it till it breaks. We might as well keep profiting until it's all over. And I was like, no, no, absolutely not. There is a responsibility of care for this place. People in Louisiana are obsessed with Louisiana. They're obsessed, we're very self-obsessed. And we care deeply about our place. And even if it's futile, if we're gonna be this kind of walled city on the edge of the gulf, the practices of care, of showing care to our ecosystems is just so vitally important. And I just think that there is this, I think that these cosmologies of care are not so far gone. They're not so far off that they still can't be reached and kind of recovered, right? And it just takes conversations, right? It takes conversations, a lot of conversations. It takes community, it takes a lot of solidarity and it's all really hard, right? Being in community is hard. Being in a community under so much pressure, there's so many communities around the world, ours is hard work. There's on Friday, I was at the closing of this exhibition called Extractivism that was organized by, well, it's organized by Tulane's Architecture Center, but it was focusing on the film in progress of Jasmine Miller, who is originally a resident of a community in Welcome, Louisiana in St. James Parish called Jones Land. At some point in the 1920s, she's a black filmmaker, and at some point in the 1920s, her family was able to acquire this sugarcane plantation and they all still live on it today. She has a massive family. She might've been joking, she said 3,000 people. I think she might've been a hyperbolic. And they were all there at this event. And so for the past 100 years, this huge family maintained a carefully guarded secret, which was that there was oil on that land. And they all decided that that land and their community were more valuable than the oil on that land, that they were gonna keep it in the ground. And people found out about it, companies found out about it, prospectors, and they never let anyone on that property. And so now at this moment, the community is for the first time, sharing this carefully protected secret with the world. And I was like, this is an amazing gift. Like there is so much courage there and wisdom that there is another way, right? And so I think there are so many stories like that, right? There are so many people who are imagining a just transition. The Descendants Project have this vision of transforming this sugarcane plantation into a lavender field because lavender cleanses the soil and apparently sugarcane is not profitable without an enslaved labor force and vast tracts of land. And so it's actually lavender yields more profit than sugarcane. And so they're trying to think of other ways of kind of just like move out of this this plantation mentality that is so pervasive and persistent. But yeah, it's happening and people are converting to our side as well. Hey, Moni, it's Mariamma. Oh, hey! Hey, girl! Hi! What's up? I'm so glad to be talking to you right now. I'm like, oh my God, that's my friend. Mariamma was a part of Blights Out in New Orleans, like a major part, and like the living historian who produced the Living Glossary, which you love. I didn't know you were here. I'm here, I've been hiding in the back. I wanted to ask, my question is kind of on a similar vein as the last one, but I wanted to ask you about reparations experiments. I was really interested when you were talking about ecological reparations and also like demanding what is owed and how that all fits together. And also just thinking about like the linearity of the law that you're talking about, like there's a rigidity that's like, there's way to like usurp the law in the way that you do and demand things, but there's still a rigidity. So I was just curious about just how do you imagine different ecological reparations experiments? You kind of name one, it's like even with a lavender field and like having to get out of a mindset, like a plantation mindset, but I'm just curious if you have more vision or other of your kind of comrades have any more vision around ecological reparations, reparations experiments. And even just thinking about how do you compost a plantation region? Like the whole thing is a plantation, it's all plantation geographies. And how do you compost that? And also on that point, I'm just also curious about any other campaigns that you and your comrades have dreamed up, especially around reparations. Is there any way for reparations campaigns or any kind of organizing of wealth, including holding those people accountable who have extracted the money that you so clearly have shown us in your mapping to be able to serve reparations, experiments, yeah, and ecological reparations. Thank you so much. So I think, I guess to start, I think the next phase of my work is really getting into this question of composting the plantation and imagining what, yeah, it's a great phrase. And I think that these burial grounds are really pointing the way. The fact that these are ecosystems, I mean, when you're out there, so one of the photos was actually taken from within one of those groves. And it really truly is a little oasis in the middle of these fields of death. And there are cardinals flying all around, a lot of cardinals, and there was a giant snake. And this amazing ecologist, I mean, so many things, Bruce Sunpai Barnes thinks that it's either a Texas rat snake or a Louisiana pine snake, which is one of the rarest snakes in the world because of habitat loss. So these groves are archives of these thriving ecosystems that once were pervasive through this region. And so we've been having, especially Joe and Joy and I from the Descendants Project started having these conversations about, what does it mean to, can you seed the trees from these groves across the region? What would it mean for them to spread out, right? I think that conversations about reparations in general in the region are very young. Nation, there have been little peppers around them, but I think it's really hard to imagine because there has just been so little, honestly goodwill in this country around the idea of reparations. We don't have great examples yet of reparations being paid to black people for slavery, but that is about to change. And the country of Barbados has recently formulated this amazing plan to sue this British lord, Lord Drax, who is the heir to one of, I think it might be the oldest sugarcane plantation in Barbados. And it's still a sugarcane plantation. There are no longer formally enslaved people on that plantation. And they're using him basically as a test case for reparations. So I think that's really interesting. And I look forward to following that story. There are actually a number of New Orleansians who are working on that project. An artist Rene Royale who is Bayesian, living in New Orleans now, and Darcy McKinnon. So Jason Jeffries is the director. So it's interesting that there is this push and pull between Barbados and London just out of happenstance. And I wonder what does that start to generate in the future? In terms of what does ecological reparations mean? I haven't fully figured it out yet. And certainly it's just not all on me to figure it out. I think it really is this collective imagining. And I think it's very culturally and regionally specific as well. And so in Louisiana, speaking about practices of care, one of the state's plans to try to recede lost wetlands is to cut a hole in the levee, something called a sediment diversion, so that sediment from the river can flow out into the oil field. The problem is that their plan doesn't acknowledge the oil field, the canals, that the existing sediment is flooding out into the sea from. So it's this really kind of pathological, kind of delusional solution to this problem. And actually the solution, there's a scientist, Dr. Jean Turner, has been studying for a long time now backfilling those canals, or canals throughout the entire wetlands using dredged sediment, which is actually very successful at receding wetlands and it actually plugs the holes in the earth that are causing land loss. But if the state acknowledged that the canals are a problem, they would be admitting that the, or acknowledge that there is the solution, they'd be admitting that they're the problem and they and these corporations that they work for would be culpable. So backfilling can actually like use, like regenerating the earth. It's the materials are all there. And then there are some other groups who are out there trying to plant marsh grass by hand, which is just a very humble, kind of almost ritual offering that could hardly match the scale of the massive, several billion dollar sediment diversion projects, but just represents a very different way of trying to engage with the earth. So I think there are a lot of such, you know, kind of humble, small scale, rituals and practices that, you know, I'm not, I shouldn't know more actually and record them. So thank you for the tip. Yeah, one more question? Okay, two more questions and one back there and then Andres. Okay, well thank you for that amazing talk, but also the questions have been really incredible to say today. So I think everybody's contributing to this collective conversation. Absolutely. I think what's so special in the conversation following your presentation is that, and also during, of course, you're sharing, you're sharing super intimate stories, you know, the conversations you've had with people that you've met and you have a responsibility in order, you know, how you're sort of the ambassador of sharing their stories and you're connecting them, say, with, you know, activists in Louisiana or in an academic setting or potentially, you know, even larger, like larger spheres. My question is, how do you reconcile some of the language in the way that some of the research is conducted out of? So, you know, from this really violent history or development, the technology of, say, cartography, from, of course, colonialism or land surveys for private property, you know, of course, these are landlots, right, for these plantations to some of the really, you know, violent histories of, like, say, military satellite imagery, you know, using these as the sites and language that in which your sort of narrative is, you know, sort of emerges out of. And how are these ways, what are the ways that you're finding conversations, you know, with people, other ways of representing, you know, many of the things that we've discussed, right, like you mentioned some of these songs or, you know, smaller initiatives, but how do you, how, how does that reconcile with these other forms of representation? And from that, do you ever feel, I guess, I wonder is that, you know, there's things that you probably don't want to share via these platforms, you know, I think about, say, if the wrong person, for example, took this amazing presentation of yours and presented in a totally other way, you know, it would sort of, it would, it might ring very differently. So I wonder if there's sort of ways that is built into your research method that protects from basically abuses of data. I wonder, could you say more about the last point? What do you think could be used in a different way? I mean, I recently been reading some text about how now, let's say, nature's becoming data. So there's certain people who say large companies, they're data-tizing trees in order. I think Shannon Matrin calls it like a techno-vegital solutionism to climate change in which these large corporations who are polluting, sort of like Chevron, they're taking something that we know in a different way and, you know, transforming them into data. So I guess when I sort of consider what it means for certain people to have knowledge of where burial grounds could be, I wonder if that's something that you, you know, would be released only to certain communities or if, you know, that fell into the hands of these large oil companies, you know, what are the implications of it and how does one sort of maneuver that, you know, as we're working through these really complicated situations? Yeah, I think that's a really good question and it's a conversation that we've been having very actively and I don't think it's a conversation that there's no easy answer. So, you know, initially when we started, so we were making this online platform, initially we were going to just make a desktop platform, something that could be downloaded and would be able to be controlled a lot more easily, but residents wanted to have something that would be publicly accessible. There were dreams of getting the information into the hands of students, of being able to take field trips, you know, out to these spaces and really, you know, have an iPad and actually like understand these geographies in real space. And there's so much hunger, you know, for the recovery of this knowledge. And yeah, like there have been concerns raised by some of the archeologists that we're working with about what it means for the information to get out. So on the one hand, you have the concern of like restricting information and then having it only being very exclusive when it really is something that was once, you know, you know, held by communities. And then on the other hand, there's the concern of, I guess, a preemptive kind of destruction of a site, right? So the Louisiana Division of Archeology has, you know, this database of all of these archeological reports of varying quality that have been, you know, written from surveys conducted on all of these former plantations. And it's allegedly publicly accessible, but you have to request permission to access them from the Division of Archeology. And you have to prove that you're a legitimate researcher. And so what this means in practice is that when a researcher with a London.ac.uk email address writes to them, they get instant access, but when a resident, a local researcher tries to get access, they're barred. The reason for the ostensible reason, which people also question for that restriction, that's not of local residents, but for the need to request permission, is that it results from NAGPRA, which is the National, the Native American Graves Protection Act, which was passed in the early 90s, as a result of people ram sacking indigenous burial grounds, you know, grave diggers going in desecrating sites, right? Trying to find artifacts that they could then display or sell. And there's a very different kind of threat to the black burial grounds, which is more, you know, it's not necessarily that people are going to try to destroy them, you know, in order to profit from them in that direct way, right? But actually profit through their erasure. And so like, in a way, the lack of knowledge about them also facilitates their eventual erasure because if people don't know that they're there and can demand their protection and there's nothing really stopping the companies. So it's a very kind of, it's a funny catch 22. And I was actually just speaking about this earlier today and asking once again, even though I was just meeting with, we just had a workshop in New Orleans last week where everyone is really excited for it to go live and it's got like a launch date. And then I was just having this thought again of like, I was reading a lot about secrecy and having this thought again about, you know, what it means. And then thinking about the Jones land and how the moment for that secrecy, you know, to end has come. And so how do we know, you know, that we're in that moment? I don't know. But it's a very important question. In terms of the language of the materials, so the thing, you know, for the forensic architecture, cartographic exercise, that language, the language of those surveys is actually the language of the land because all of those lines, you know, those plantation borders, the field paths, et cetera, et cetera are inscribed into the land and the footprint of the sugar mills and the slave quarters are oftentimes scars left on the earth. So learning to read that language, you know, is important for understanding, you know, for reading the earth, right? And understanding how the earth has been made as such, right? And of course, then locating burial grounds and finding a way beyond the world as it has been made. So I think for me, like, it's really important to study that language, to understand it in order to move beyond it and then also to share it with others. And it's been really amazing. This whole process over the years has been really amazing as, you know, local residents, you know, are like, wow, you know, like I always, you know, would see these oak trees here and wonder why they're all in the straight line. And now I know that these are the oak trees that were leading up to the big house on this plantation or, you know, local residents also have a lot of knowledge of, oh, that street is called Backquarters Road. Oh yeah, it's where the slave quarters used to be. And then they see it spatialized. And, you know, it's this kind of, there's this excitement, right? Of the knowledge that people have been carrying in their heads being kind of evidenced in this way. And I think because of this kind of systemic neglect of local knowledge by the state, you know, it's really, it's reaffirming and it's exciting. I mean, there becomes this kind of treasure hunt feeling, you know, with recovering a lot of these sites and people have a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of excitement about going through, going through these materials. So yeah, I think the language, it's hard, but it's, yeah, it's the predominant language like English in the world. And it does facilitate a certain amount of, yeah, connection, right? For what it's worth. And then, you know, the image, the video at the beginning of the presentation, what I didn't say is that all of those are the same lines and points that I was mapping for fall to oil. So when I was spending hundreds of hours, you know, organizing them by company and just kind of staring at the screen during the pandemic, you know, I started to see these shapes kind of emerging from the lines and points and started to imagine them as constellations. And so this language, this data heavy language of the state and these corporations started to communicate something different to me about cosmology. And so I had this vision of, you know, animating them and doing that. And I eventually did it. And so the film that I made for, but I guess I always was kind of, I was lucky to get this commission from the Biennale because, you know, my focus had always been fall to oil. It had been, you know, like pushing this out because I saw that there was a public need and I wanted to make sure it happened, right? And I kind of, I set aside this whole other kind of, I guess, part of myself. And so when I got this commission from the Biennale, I, like the film was, like it was already in my head, kind of fully formed. And it flowed very naturally out of me because it had been kind of developing simultaneously with that other work. And for that I, yes, still had this, you know, aerial perspective, which I like to think not as, like seeing like a state, but seeing as a bird or an ancestor, but also I spent a lot of time canoeing through the wetlands and capturing, you know, footage of water. And so it experimented with like kind of merging those two perspectives, the, from the ground, from the water with the aerial in order to try to, yeah, encompass, I guess, the fullness of the perspectives of the various, you know, entities of the world. You know, last question, yeah. Well, this amazing lecture and work, of course. The Schwab, you mentioned it several times. And I think that, and also the last movie that you showed with the water flowing, overlap to the image of the land from above and the way that you're talking now. And it seems that the Schwab is playing, is doing a lot of work for you, right? And somehow it's also very different to these piped ecosystems of the extractive industries. Also, it seems to be connected to this notion of the body as something that is flowing, diluted, unsyped up, very different to the obsession of individuality of the extractivist economies. So I think that there's something there of another cosmology that you're announcing that could be also the response, I feel, you know, the alternative or the form. And I wonder what that also connects with the long trajectory of history, of slaveryism and unslaborism. And I'm thinking, for instance, of the stories of the projectives that would find shelter in the swarms that Ryle Snowton narrated. I think there's so much there in the Schwab. And I think it's very important to ask you about this because there's so many ideas probably there, right? Yeah, I mean, swamps are always doing a lot. And I've been doing a little bit of writing about swamps since Miami, like just really thinking about the racialization of different landscapes and the preference of the clear blue water of the Florida beaches and the white sands versus the murky, brown, obscure waters of the swamp that every statesman is drawn either in practice or in metaphor to try to drain and control. And they're seen as these festering cesspools of disease and venomous snakes and alligators whom I love, my favorite creatures. And they're cradles of civilization everywhere in the world. And so to me, there's just something, I don't know, so remarkable about that. Like the place that we've come, that we've emerged from is so reviled. And it kind of reminds me of there's this George Bataille, piece, I think it's called The Big Toe, but he writes about how The Big Toe is the most hated part of the human body because it's the closest to the ground. And we prefer the head because it's the closest to the sky and we imagine ourselves as gods. And so we wanna leave the earth that is our mother and our origin in favor of the father of the sky. I don't know if he says all that. He says something like that. And yeah, so I think that there definitely is something there in the swamps. And I wanna spend some more time thinking about it. And I have to always, I need to control how far I reach, but I'm really interested in at some point also researching the Mesopotamian Marshes and the Nile Delta and the Niger Delta, these other cradles of civilizations and all of these places that are rich with oil. And how it is that you have these cycles of life and death over eons and life ultimately settles as death, as these subterranean, these fields of oil and gas. And we can kind of imagine these oil and gas fields as the final resting places of millennia of life, right? And these deltaic wetlands, these riverine deltas in particular where you've got this alluvial sediment and salt water emerging and mixing and the continental shelf and all of these dynamics coming together. They draw people, two dozen indigenous nations in Louisiana. They draw people to these places and then they also attract their destroyers, right? They attract the conquerors and the oil corporations, right? So yeah, this is definitely a space that I'm really interested in kind of pushing further and yes, especially in the context of Maranaj and how it is that, in Louisiana, it's the back swamps in Haiti and Jamaica and Brazil. It's the forested mountains, these kind of treacherous zones that offer the possibility of freedom. And so what can we learn today from those geographies and those histories? Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.