ECOLOGIES OF REPAIR
with Imani Jacqueline Brown and Carolina Caycedo
maat Climate Collective

For this upcoming event, as part of the Climate Emergency > Emergence programme, the maat Climate Collective is joined by two artists both working at the nexus of climate disaster, environmental racism, and colonial extractivism, against which any reparative horizon must begin with cultivating the collective memory of environmental violence in the face of the ongoing forces of erasure and displacement. In Brown’s case, she investigates Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana (read more), revealing a geography where some of the most polluting petrochemical facilities overlay and threaten to displace plantation-era cemeteries of the historically enslaved, materialising a trajectory of racial, toxic capitalism that continues to physiologically debilitate majority-Black fence-line communities in the present. Caycedo’s recent work, The Blessings of the Mystery (read more), made in collaboration with David de Rozas, focuses on West Texas and the region’s complex histories of colonisation, migration, and ecological precarity, examined from the perspective of Juan Mancias, Chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. Our discussion will foreground aesthetic approaches to socio-environmental violence, including forensic visuality, observational documentary, Black and Indigenous ecologies, multigenerational oral history, and archival politics, as well as asking where the critically expository might open up reparatory possibility.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and researcher from New Orleans. Her work investigates the continuum of Extractivism, from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to contemporary gentrification, fossil fuel production, and police and corporate impunity. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that comprise the foundations of US society, she opens room to imagine a path to ecological reparations. Among other things, Imani is currently a researcher with Forensic Architecture and a visiting research fellow at the Center for Research Architecture, where she received her MA with distinction in 2019.

Carolina Caycedo is a London-born Colombian artist living in Los Angeles. She participates in movements of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right. Carolina’s artistic practice has a collective dimension to it in which performances, drawings, photographs and videos are not just an end result, but rather part of the artist’s process of research and acting. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities, and generates a debate about the future in relation to common goods, environmental justice, just energy transition, and cultural biodiversity.