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Our research and practices are located within contested zones and border areas that are subject to militarised violence, occupation, surveillance and colonial extraction. In such areas the hard strata of spatial violence – infrastructural, extractive, territorial – often become overexposed.  How do we work within such conditions, recognising the implications of violence, but resisting the urge to think violence as the sole spatial analytic? Considering violence beyond the spectacular and within a slower temporality might require modes of research that go beyond the investigative or evidentiary. We might instead work with multiple narratives and temporalities and consider violence as a form of seepage, of exhaustion or dispersion. Thinking through the material, affective and atmospheric qualities of conflict zones might also require other forms of thinking and doing that make room for the faint web of sedimenting relationalities that endure in place and produce a form of worlding within and in-between the hard strata of territorial forces?

We understand the field as a thick surface with a depth and texture that can only be apprehended as patchy and partial. Referring to anthropologist Anna Tsing and her colleagues’ concept of ‘patchy anthropocene’ we are interested in how the uneven distribution of the effects of transforming territories are intensified within contested zones whose opacity narrows our field of vision and reduces our capacities to listen. How can engaged and aesthetic practices enable other modes of seeing and listening across landscapes that are often constructed as out-of-bounds by state and other actors? To discuss the entanglements of violence, the environment and what Alexander Weheliye calls ‘racializing assemblages’, we are particularly interested in thinking through the implications of decolonial theory and black studies for these geographies and their historical and social specificities, including the legacies of colonialism, historical complicities within the slave trade, social organisation across lines gender, caste and tribe. We hope to discuss what could be the contemporary decolonial practices in extractive infrastructures and controlled zones.

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Helene Kazan, "Decolonizing Archives and Law's Frame of Accountability." Vol. 4: In the Presence of Others, Special Dossier on Documentary World-Making, World Records, 2020 (https://vols.worldrecordsjournal.org/04/20)

Introduction chapter by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah ed., Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought. London/New York: Verso, 2020.

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Macerena Gomez Barris

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Ola Hassanain trained her focus on the subtle politics of space—namely, how built spaces react to and reinforce violence from state entities, which in turn, creates a built environment that reflects, responds to, regulates the lives of those who inhabit it. Her most recent work explores an idea of “space as discourse,” an expanded notion of space that encompasses political and environmental questions. Her work tries to develop a spatial vocabulary that follows how ruptures presented by 'political events', make it possible to aspire to new kind of ecologies. Ola's development of critical spatial practice is party informed by her post-academic training which includes an ongoing Ph.D. in Practice candidacy at the Academy of Fine Art, a BAK fellowship 2017-2018, and teaching in HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and Sandberg Institute amongst others.

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beach commons

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infrastructure, hauntings

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7th May

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legalities

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Anarcho-Indigenous feminisms

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cognitive injustice

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Public Seminars 2021
http://bit.ly/3cZtFWH

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settler colonialism

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jeontologies

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herbacide

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extraction

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17 July 2021, 6pm, Ramallah
"Eco-Politics of Settler colonialism, Development and the Palestinian Space"

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21st April, 12 pm CET
"These Walls: Grammars of Violence and Workable Geographies"

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“Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Contemporary Practices of Israeli Settler-Colonialism”

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28th April, 3 pm, London

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26th July, 10 am, New York

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31 March 2021, 11 am (ETS, New York)
"South-Sur: Thinking and Acting Beyond the Colonial Anthropocene"

bit.ly/3sdsb0n