 Felly hynny'n ddullci yn fawr, ddwy'r fawr yn Enw'i'n gwirionedd yn Gwyrraeth, y gallu gaeliaeth yn London. Bydd ymlaen nhw'n iawn i'n gweithio ar hyn o'r awtoddiad a ddod o'ch gweithio'r dymellu'r llwyaf gydag i gael ei wneud o'n gyfarwg pethau oedd yn gwneud i gael gael gynhyrchu'r hyn ysgolot yn y frefadol, ac mae'n gweithio'r peidio bod yn gweithio i gael gaelio'u wasbannu a'r sefydliadau hefyd wedi allan yn ymddangos yn y rhydd. On i wneud y cymdeithasiedd yn y pryd wedi eu dynch yn allan yn gweithio ymiddlo i wneud i gael i gael eu lannu rhaglen nhw ymddangos ac yma symud yma. Mae'n disiadol wedi'u bwysig iawn myfyrdd gwahanol. Mae'n gwellio ffordd eich cyfnod hynny ar y cyfnod yw ar gyfer iawn. Mae'n gwellio arall dwy o'ch cyfrifio ar y gweithio, ac rydyn ni'n credu i'ch ffliwio. Mae Saber Caen wedi'ch cyfrifio ar y gweithio'r talog, y dŵl ymwyllgor. Saber wedi'ch cyfrifio ar ddechrau sydd ymwyllgor yng Nghyrch Llywodraeth, y dŵl ymwyllgor, y dŵl ymwllgor ymwllgor, is of the many of the dioramas of a bureaucrat's boring office, flashing LED of a retro-sify machine seen at power stations, to Indigo textile banners honouring peasant rewards. She balances grandeur, artefies and satire in order to explore the cracks and the structures. Sabah founded the Meri Museum Artists' Residency and a satirical artists' collective, Paq Khawadir Painting Club, triggered from the commission of the Leoho Bianaal, I think it was the second edition. Her works have been shown as part of many biennials, including the Shah Jah biennial, Lahore biennial and the Karachi biennial amongst other spaces. And this year's Sava was also the artist-in-residence at the Delphina Foundation. Boulle Francis presents her paper, Grandmothers of the Sea, Stories and Lessons from Five Cosa Ocean Elders. Boulle is a scholar-activist based in South Africa, currently known as the Rhodes University. At the Environmental Learning Research Centre in one ocean hub project, which is led by the Strathclyde University in the UK, Boulle has a different vision for what academic research can do, both for academia and for those who are studied. With women in small-scale fishing communities in the eastern Cape, she's undertaking a pioneering collaborative research at the nexus of environmental justice, gender equality, ocean livelihoods and the inclusivity of ocean-related disaster management programme at the Institute of Development Studies at the National University for Science and Technology in Zimbabwe. Boulle was awarded the 2023 Earth Fellowship by Scotland Graduate School of Art and Humanities and the Scotland British Council to address climate emergence. Our final speaker is Imani Jacqueline Brown, who will be presenting her paper. Our first name for this region was Home, Bringing Other Worlds into Being in Cancer Alley, Louisiana. Imani is an artist, activist and writer, architectural researcher from New Orleans, now based in London. Her work investigates the continuum of extractivism, which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel productions and climate change. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that form the foundation of settler-colonial societies, she opens a space to imagine parts of ecological reparations. Imani's practice combines photography and videography, archival research, ecological philosophy, legal theory, people's history, remote sensing and counter-cartographic strategies to disentangle the spatial logics that make geographies, unmade communities and break Earth's geology. Her research is disseminated internationally through art installations, public actions, reports and testimony delivered to courts and organs of the United Nations. Imani is currently a PhD candidate in geography at Queen Mary University of London and a research fellow with forensic architecture and associate lecturer in the master's architecture programme at the Royal College of Arts. So, if you would please join me in welcoming all three of our speakers, but Sabah first, please. Thank you. Hello everyone and I think it's a real privilege and an honour to be here in such good company. I'll be sharing some of my work. This is mostly my field work and these were projects I've been doing since 2019 on water. So, how I got interested in water was we go to this British hill station which is muddy where I also had this art space. We would only get water for 15 minutes twice a week and that was enough to just wash your dishes and you really had to think about when to take a shower. And I started thinking about where's my water coming from and why is this happening to me and why are there so many water discrepancies. And when I started inviting artists it was such a big problem because they didn't know how to ration water. So, I got into all this bureaucratic problems with water and meeting bureaucrats and asking them what was the issue and they would tell me once a dam comes up it will be all fine. So, then I started searching for these dams what are these dams that are going to come up. And this is one of the installations and this is the second one. So, walking around water bodies to understand the interwoven links between history and politics of flow, fluidity, bodies blocking the water and bodies moving along water in Pakistan. Complex irrigation and engineering projects introduced and conceived by the colonial British statecraft for enhancing agriculture produce reshaped the landscape and abetted feudalism and classism. The Indus River is cut by seven colonial barages, a mega hydropower dam and several mega dams which are under construction or in the pipeline. They leave a trickle for women farmers and peasants at the tail end of the irrigation system. Ambitious man-made engineering structures store water but massive glaciers are natural water reservoirs and are continuously shifting and flooding. A part of the third pole and drawing from the work of James C. Scott, spaces around glaciers and mountains are for refuge from repressive states and are home to shattered communities who have unique languages and agricultural techniques. The plains have been sites for gradient societies relying on indentured labour, later intervened by barages and dams while the mountains with glaciers with opposite and housed small egalitarian communities who were runaways. Our five rivers are far inaccessible and sometimes dried up because of an upstream dam built by our own governments or by India. Two of the river's water rights were given to India in exchange for mega dams. The natural water course has become a sewage drain that intakes effluence from the industry from the cities as well as upstream India, eventually leaking harsh toxins into aquifers. The rivers are alive but also dying. They swell, flood and destroy or run dry, leaving those on the coastal belt completely parched. These tides or a lack of lead to ethnic tensions and transnational conflicts. River Indus has long been a site for expeditions and voyages for ethnographers, geographers and spies. In 1830s, Alexander Burns navigated the Indus for a future attack and occupation that led to abduction of the last king of Punjab, the leapsing and laying down of canal colonies in Punjab and the first colonial water project. Expeditions were conducted for surveillance to expose what was hidden from the colonial eye. Mountains in the north were hiding spaces to live in isolation but were made visible by a British agent Durand. He later drew lines between Afghanistan and Pakistan which recently led to deportation of millions of people living in Pakistan. In 2018, a report claimed that Pakistan would soon run out of water by 2025 and the official proposed solution was to crowdfund mega dams along the Chinese Belt and Road project. The government is under the misconception that fresh water is being wasted at the delta and should be blocked in the north using dams. Anyone challenging these proposed ideas would be charged of treason by the Chief Justice. This was all the more reason to show up at these sites dressed up like cyborgs, part female, part military and go on the Indus River driving from dam to dam. Women artists in Pakistan are stereotyped as housewives and hobby artists who paint to decorate their homes. I proposed to the water and power department authority that I would like to visit dams for landscape painting. The uniform made us indistinguishable from one another and we blended it with the military guards at the barrage. The bureaucrats who received us on site were met with confusion and thought we were from an unknown government department. It was like wearing a second skin to walk freely in public where we became the official authority on the roads. Women are always deterred from exploring, walking, running and shielded from the outside. River Indus flowed for millions of years, flooding, retracting and giving life to the first structured towns of Mahanjodaro that survived through indentured labour that produced agriculture on mudflats. However, the river was blockaded in 1936 by a British colonial barrage. A project that continues in the shape of world bank-funded mega hydropower dams cutting its natural flow and habitats for dolphins, fish and the Mojana tribe. Dam were part of the modernist project to shed the colonial past. There is opacity around dams and most are unreachable in remote areas and near borders. They are portrayed as projects for the national interest. They divert water, electrical power to the urban centres and those who have power. At the tail end of the canal command is salinity, sea intrusion and loss to the ancestral agricultural lands. Landowners have turned into activists and lawyers leading marches but are seldom heard. Gulab Shah, the head of the Fishermen's Union, tells us how the media has lost interest in their cause and they only have limited resources to make continued protests. Keiti Bandar, part of the delta and was like a medieval port town, is a zombie land now. It is heavily militarised with a lack of fresh water and the sea is eating the land. Thousands of rupees are spent on buying fresh drinking water by impoverished fishermen where ground water is saline. To make the barrage projects profitable, a new class of agriculturists with landlords and water lords was created by the British statecraft. Much of Sin's land is cultivated by bonded labour called Harries and small farmers who are mostly women because men have moved to urban centres for work. They cannot compete with the powerful landlords upstream who stop their waters. Cultivation sometimes goes to waste because the landlord has sucked away all the water. In 2010, the land was completely submerged in a flood and several nights were spent taking refuge in trees because the landlord had breached a canal to save his own lands from the deluge. The hills around the reservoir of Terbeladam hold stories of Raja Rasalu who hunted giants and freed people from the tyranny. These stories were sung by local bards and have been lost with the waters. Fragmented songs were recorded and decoded by British officers and their wives. While the government posed in billions of dollars to make new concrete giants to produce electricity, people have self-organised and harnessed the sun with small solar panels. This is the last slide and also my favourite slide because the small solar panel which is charging the phone. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Hello. Hello, London. Can you hear me? Okay, yeah, sure. I have to wear this. Good afternoon, everyone. It's such an honour to be here and to speak to you about the grandmothers of the sea, stories from five Cosaeltas from the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Before I start my presentation, I'd like to thank everyone here, the organisers, the Papikin Centre, Paul Melo Centre, everyone who came here, the presenters that I've had, great speakers. It's such a pleasure to be presenting with all of you here and all the audience for coming. Thank you so much. It's so beautiful to have all of you here. I know I won't have any much time to thank you and I'm saying thank you now. As they introduced me, I'm a scholar activist from South Africa in the Eastern Cape in Makanda, which was used to be known as Gramstown, and I come from a university currently known as Rhodes University. They're really roads that you know, the big colonialists that we've ever had in our times. So, as a child, I saw myself as part of the ocean and grew up knowing that my source of livelihood and income was the ocean. So I had to look after it. I hope one day we will be able to go to the ocean as we used to do so, that we perform those rituals that our forefathers did to make spaces visible. This is one of the grandmothers when I spoke to her, what she told me, because South Africa comes from a pathete, comes from a lot of injustices that have happened previously. I'm speaking about women who had not ocean all their lives but were displaced because of giving way for lots of things to take place, things like such as MPA, marine protected areas that the government was introducing in the area. So, as such, they had to be refused, they had to be removed. And this woman in particular is called Grandmother, Nomali Wong, who has experienced the harsh dichotomies of soul nourishing kinship and speakable hardships and trauma in relation to the ocean. As children living in a world where they had free and adulterate access to the ocean, they have a life and associated wisdom that spans through a shifting political and social landscape of South Africa. Despite this wisdom and expertise, they remain unseen. Now as elderly women, they articulate the quality of their lives and the impact of the legacy of direct and structural racism and economic expansion in South Africa on their relationality to the sea. The Eastern Cape, a large yet impoverished province in South Africa, is predominantly inhabited by the Cosa people. Live loose rely heavily on small-scale livestock farming and traditional activities linked to the ocean, such as picking up off mussels, up a loni and sea with harvesting. Historical exclusions and forced removers during apartheid, along with the cultural schemes, impacted coastal inland communities. We see Grandmother here harvesting and doing all sorts of things which used to be part of their lives and at the moment they can't access that. Coastal areas, maintaining more traditional lifestyles with limited development opportunities, experienced weaker colonial influence, cultural differences intensified in the 50s and post-freedom, shaping coastal communities' perspectives on social justice, and mistrackers for resources. Women in the patriarchal system are often excluded from decision-making, particularly in marine livelihoods. Barriers to ocean access have intensified, especially post-COVID, eroding hydrofeminist principles unique to Eastern Cape Grandmothers. I want to particularly explain that what took place at the time when we had covered the government rolled out lots of programs using online platforms, and most people couldn't access the online platforms. Hence, Grandmothers, like the five Cosa women that I'm speaking about, they were left out. So hydrofeminism emphasising a holistic and relational approach to the intersectional of water, feminism and ecological consciousness. Hydrofeminism recognising the interconnectedness between women and water, highlighting the roles women often play as care-takers of water resources and the impacts water-related issues on their lives. Hydrofeminism aims to amplify the voices women in water-related discourse and advocate for more equitable and sustainable water practices. This chapter aims to spotlight the experiential realities of hydrofeminist leaders from rural South Africa, challenging the hero myth and emphasising the unique knowledge they bring to ocean governance and literates. Since 2019, I've befriended the five elders I call the Cosa women, and they started talking to me and our collaboration to support self-organising, yet government-mandated fishing cooperatives. We have uncovered some particular insights around constraints and enablers to meaningful collaborative and the inclusiveness of bottom-up ocean governance, which is the core development of new capacities and the new live loads projects through our work in the coastal justice network. We have gained trust and critical insights into the experiences and concerns of the women's cooperatives and collectives along our ocean. As you can see, the grandmother here, I just want to bring you here. This is how hard they work in the ocean, where they continue to strike, carrying out the harvest that they've realised from the ocean, but the harvest which they are now prevented to do. As I'm fluent in Cosa, I carried out an adulterate approach to exploring the personal experiences of the five grandmothers in their indigenous language with minimal edits, conducting interviews with each one of them. We build a conceptual profile of each woman's context and situation through many informal conversations and visits, along with establishing informed consent and ongoing response and negotiation of ethical practices. As you can see, I visited them when they were doing their harvesting in the ocean, where they are not allowed. I want to bring you to this picture in particular, where they are harvesting seaweed to sell it to a micro person who is actually exploiting them. We then followed with a formal open-ended interview with the five generative questions which included, who taught you how to fish and harvest? What's your first moment of most interesting experience with the ocean? In what way have you been excluding from the ocean? What is your hope for the ocean? Because we know that they have lived within the ocean all their lives. And the answers we would receive, it was like, I was taught to fish, harvest, up alone and seaweed at the time when we got involved. It was mainly for home consumption, but over time we came to know and meet buyers that were visiting our area in search of the seaweed and up alone. That way our interest intensified as we started to make a good income. Making man out of up alone at a tender age was very exciting and adventurous as a young person. It motivated me to work hard each time we go to the ocean and I developed a passion for up alone and seaweed harvest. A skill I still survive on today. However, the skill has become exploited by those in power. I now carry a heavy load of seaweed with no benefits. The buyer decides on what to pay us and in turn what exploited. Explains Kokonofo o carrying her bags of seaweed. When you have a seaweed, I must explain that when it's wet, it's very heavy. Let's say it's 20 kgs of seaweed. But when it's dry, it loses that 10 times its weight. So what do they gain and do they buy it at dry weight? Which is very exploitative. You know the sea water calms you, helps you to connect with your ancestors. Listen to the ocean. It is a spiritual experience. And each time when I'm at the ocean, I feel quite happy as I relax and meditate and talk to my ancestors. We were forcibly removed from the living near the ocean during a passage. My parents taught me how to use ocean helps for healing and hence the removal meant that access was impossible. But I would travel a long journey to access the ocean. However, the government has gone to declare MPAs in the very ocean sites I would use. This means complete no access and it is done without my input. They create a conflict but above all exclude me for assessing my healing powers. So she was here emphasizing the fact that the government ignores the local people, ignores the knowledge of local people. They do not consult them. For example, creating an MPA within where the coastal communities are living is actually a conflict on its own, because that's where they access their spiritual activities, not only to mention about accessing their lovelies in terms of fishing and other things that they do within the ocean. These powerful, inspiring and harrowing stories reveal common themes. Gender division of labour persists from childhood to adulthood, shaping the relationality to the ocean, geographically dispossession due to apartheid laws and recent legislative controls including permits and cooperatives approvers restrict access to the sea. Women derive livelihood spiritually and emotionally connections from the sea, susceptible to exploitation by the governments and big businesses. These powerful inspiration and harrowing stories reveal common themes which, the third, the throw of them I've just mentioned. So going forward, there is also the generational learning and cultural relationality associated with sustainable sea use connected to women to memories of grandparents and parents. Despite careful political articulation, women face silencing and exclusion by government and big businesses seeking remedies. Grandmothers emphasise their connection to the ocean as part of their identity, serving as a conduit to ancestors in history. When times are rough at home and the government offers us nothing, when we wait and wait to hear from the Department of Forest, the only solution I can find is with the ocean. I know where my strength is coming from and it is from the sea. These are the ways from Gokomacleg. So, in order to create a space where their voices are heard, we use theatre, we use a big theatre where we ask the grandmothers to come and tell their stories and then we invite the policy makers, the labour unions and almost everyone to a room. So this is a way under progress where by now we have collected data, we are sharing it, we are now giving it to a theatre where they are making, for example, this one is ongoing, where now it has performed once at the university and now we have to take it to towns where the decision makers are and create a dialogue between the stakeholders and the women in order to set them free. Thank you. This is the last slide that I have had. Thank you. Hello. Good afternoon. I don't know much about Gwladys, but I think that the river is a strong, brown god and we are its children. The muddy Mississippi gave birth to our land through 7,000 years of alluvial leaps, throwing out skirts of water as she danced in harmony with the outer continental shelf and the muskrat and the oyster. The oyster eaters are called this place for the Bonsha, a land of many towns. Our ecology is a messy community of bodies, made of bodies, of bodies, bodies of land, bodies of water, bodies of people flow and become entangled, become solid through the Bons and hold each to the other. The late Malodoma Somay reminds me that our ancient non-human ancestors reside beneath the earth's surface as a vast pool of energy. Oh, to realise our kinship of the forces that we pump and burn and deploy against the world. Is climate change the exhalation of a grief too great, too unfathomable to be tabulated in parts per million? In the 1930s, the coastal wetlands of the US state of Louisiana were found to be one of the greatest sources of oil and gas in the nation. Oil companies searched for the most cost-effective ways to access those vast subterranean fields, but our wetlands got in the way. They were thick with mud and vegetation and they carried themselves with the trickster energy. A patch of flotant appearing one moment to be solid ground would suddenly transform into water in the next. Roads just couldn't hold and muskrats gnawed away at wooden boardwalks laid by the corporations. So to hell with them, they said. The corporations decided to just cut their way on through. And so they dredged over 10,000 linear miles of canals in order to drill over 90,000 wells. From those 90,000 wells, oil is pumped up river through 50,000 miles of pipeline which largely terminate in a region known today by industry as the petrochemical corridor. Here, hundreds of the nation's most polluting petrochemical plants and refineries occupy the fallow footprints of formerly slave-powered sugarcane plantations adjacent to majority black communities, the homes of descendants of people who were formerly enslaved on those very grounds. The first nickname granted to this region was plantation country. This plant is the mosaic agrico-diamonium phosphate fertilizer plant. It occupies six antebellum plantations alongside the majority black communities of Welcome and Lemonville. Its emissions include ammonia, a skin and mucosal system irritant, benzene and nitrogen oxides, known human carcinogens, and PM 2.5, a respiratory irritant. In the 1980s, residents of these river parishes recognized their communities disproportionate rate and risk of cancer and other serious health ailments. And so they offered this region the nickname of Cancer Alley. Havoc is produced at all stages of the fossil fuel production cycle. Here at its terminus, the petrochemical plantation contains all the successive layers of violence that form the continuum of extractivism. To accumulate existence, extractive agents deploy the force of segregation to sever the bonds within and between ecological communities and to divide those communities into alienable parcels. Human beings are segregated from our wider ecological communities and black bodies are segregated from the body of humanity. The end product of segregation is the world's disintegration. Since oil and gas was first discovered around 90 years ago, 2,000 square miles of coastal wetlands have eroded, leaving coastal communities more vulnerable to the hurricanes that come with increasing strength and frequently off the gulf. Historically, sugar cane production was so grueling that the plantations of the lower Mississippi Delta bore a negative demographic birthrate among the enslaved population. Each plantation required at least one burial ground to hold its dead. And so as the plants here in Cancer Alley toxify the air breathed by black descendant communities, they also desecrate the remains of their ancestors. But sometimes these burial grounds survive and even thrive holding new life. Groves of trees planted by the historically enslaved to mark the graves of their loved ones. These sacred groves rupture the continuum of extractivism and gesture to other ways of being in the world, other relations that flourish at the back of the plantation. The continuum of extractivism is designed, enforced, and articulated by the state. Consider, for example, this 1938 edition of the Louisiana Conservation Review published by the Department of Natural Resources, which proposes a myth of the romantic history of natural gas, which begins with a picture of 15 husky negro slaves. And we can consider the 2014 St James Parish Government comprehensive plan, which reminisces about the era of fabulous plantation life, the day of luxurious living, sumptuous entertainment, and delightful ease, before going on to rezone the majority black community of Burton Lane as industrial, and to redesignate the community of welcome as a new category that they call, quote, existing residential slash future industrial. For all of this violence compacted into layers of earth in the petrochemical plantation extractive zone, it has been and remains a place where black people live, love, die, and are remembered in spite of it all. It is for those reasons that Joy Banner, community activist and founder of the Descendants Project, reminds us that before we all came to know this region's myriad grim nicknames, her first name for this land was home, and home is a place worth fighting for. As we evidence the continuum of extractivism, we must also attend to and celebrate the people who rupture this continuum through their persistent resistance. In her book, Rituals, Runaways and the Haitian Revolution, Crystal Nicole Eddins writes that, quote, black women's social positionality was and is the springboard for bridge leadership activism that is its most potent and culturally driven free spaces, such as ritual gatherings, and that connects rank and file grassroots efforts to larger movement organizing. In the context of enslavement, women created social networks among themselves and others to ensure their survival and to coordinate liberatory actions, end quote. The descendants of people historically enslaved on Louisiana's petrochemical plantations continued this legacy today, and when in 2018, for most of plastics, announced plans to construct a new plastic production facility adjacent to Welcome, resident Gail LeBuff announced that there are graves on that land, and resident Sharon Levine had had enough. She formed the Fence Line community activist group Rye St James in resistance. Working with an archaeology firm, they located four anti-bellum black burial grounds, one on each of the anti-bellum plantations making up for Mosa's construction site. My name is Sharon Levine. I'm the director and founder of Rye St James, right here in St James Parish, and we are here to commemorate the graves of our enslaved ancestors. We are going to stand together, and we are going to fight for Mosa. We will not allow them to take our ancestors out of this ground and put them somewhere else. We are Rye St James, and we are going to stand up for St James Parish. This is our home. We're not going anywhere. For Mosa has to have a fight on their hands. Together with Rye St James, I worked with forensic architecture to develop a methodology for locating black cemeteries across a 60-kilometre area of Cancer Alley, identifying sacred heritage sites that were at risk, but prior to industry announcing its plans to break ground. We sourced seven decades of aerial photography and satellite imagery that provided visibility of the surface dating back to the 1940s and using QGIS, a free open-source geoinformational system software. We geo-referenced, mosaic'd and analyzed each photographic series. We also sourced post-bellum coast surveys of the region dating from 1878 and 1894. So this geo-referencing mosaic'ing and analyzing of these maps and images results in a digital portal through which we can travel back and forth in time, studying the topographical logics, and its continuities and mutations over the decades. This platform is in the process of being turned into a publicly accessible internet web platform, which will be launched in the new year. We learned that whenever a grove of trees or other topographical formation interrupts the otherwise seamless tapestry of sugar cane fields, archaeologists refer to it as a topographical anomaly. So sometimes these anomalies are revealed to be the ruins of historic slave quarter and sugar mill complexes, and sometimes they are found to be black burial grounds. We identified over 1,000 anomalies in the 1940 aerial mosaic, but by the time of the 2021 satellite imagery, only 350 remained. Hundreds have been topographically erased by industrial development. Through the portal, the scale of this cultural landscape comes into focus. The scale of what was, what has been lost, but what also remains to be recovered and protected. And we use these maps to bring renewed visibility to the back of the plantation, the under-researched world where historically enslaved people were forced to live, labour, and die. Through enslaved testimony, we learned the grueling realities of the conditions there. Adults and children alike who were worked in industrial factories, discarded like tools when they fell out of use, and we read enslaved narratives that spoke of pregnant women toiling in the fields throughout the duration of their pregnancy, giving birth amid fields of cane. So all of this work has become, has had numerous outputs, including a series of contributions to locally led legal efforts. And in September of last year, a Louisiana judge went so far as to reaffirm Sharon Levine's words that land worked by historically enslaved people must be considered sacred. Sharon's notion of sacred land is no historical artifact. It is an intergenerational condition of care. Her words open lines of sight from the courtroom to her own home garden where she recognizes hollow pecan nuts and silenced bird song as byproducts of fossil fuel production. From her garden, lines of sights connect across time to the back of the plantation where historically enslaved people cultivated their own gardens of nourishing food and medicine, which were ferried back and forth from the plantation into the back swamp forests where maroon communities lived and organized revolt. Archeologists studying one burial grove in 2015 noted that historically enslaved people planted magnolia and willow trees to mark the graves of their loved ones. But they did not merely plant these trees for lack of stone. Ex-slave narratives also testify to enslaved people crossing miles of sugarcane fields in the embrace of night to gather with maroons in the forests. There they danced, organized, plotted rebellions, buried their deceased and lived. There West and Central African ecological praxis were seeded in and adapted to the forests of the Americas. There they syncratized with indigenous ecological knowledge systems. And there it was said that the spirits of the dead resided in the crowns of trees. So these burial groves are precious cultural survivals, surviving the felling of primordial forests, the encroachment of cane fields, the intrusion of petrochemical industry and the onslaught of tropical storms. And when Joy Banner of the Descendants Project touches the leaves of these trees, newly recognized once again as our ancestors, she feels as though she is reaching across time to embrace her kin. So more than survivals, these antebellum black burial groves are the frontlines of multi-dimensional, multi-generational and multi-species resistance to extractivism. They are exemplars of other ways of being in the world. And from their footprints, from the borderlands of digital technology, we are called to descend, to return to the ground, to remember, to listen, to feel and to conspire, which means to breathe together. Thank you. Thank you. I just want to thank Ella and Estrida and Vania and everyone at the Barbican, the other panelists for inviting me and for the fantastic presentation. So I look forward to being in discussion with you.