Tower shooting flames

EXTRACTION: DECOLONIAL VISUAL CULTURES IN THE AGE OF THE CAPITALOCENE

All events are on Tuesday evenings, 5:30-7:30, in the Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 108 at UC Santa Cruz

Extraction designates capitalism’s fundamental logic of withdrawal—of value, nutrients, energy, labor, time—from people, lands, culture, life-forms, the elements, without corresponding deposit (except as externalities of non-value in the form of pollution, waste, climate change, illness, and death). It forms hierarchies of power around divisions that are racially, ethnically, sexually, and ecologically inscribed. How can we understand the diverse cultures of extraction in relation to histories of colonialism, green capitalism, the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, and how are these cultures being visualized?

Equally, how is extraction, as a fundamental logic of living and dying in the era of fossil fuel capitalism and catastrophic climate change, being contested at the individual and collective levels, including by cultural producers (socially engaged artists, anti-colonial activists, Indigenous water protectors, media theorists, writers, architects, and designers, etc.)? Faced with multiple tipping points moving us implacably toward a catastrophic environmentally altered future—and now with a US president hostile to climate science and industrial regulations—how might we create possibilities for living non-extractively in ways singular and plural today?

   During Winter and Spring 2017, T.J. Demos of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Creative Ecologies in collaboration with the artist Laurie Palmer of UC Santa Cruz’s Arts Department will initiate the Arts-led research project EXTRACTION, co-sponsored by the Arts Research Institute and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, UCSC’s Arts Research Institute, UCSC’s College Nine and College Ten, and CDAR (UCSC Center for Documentary Arts and Research). The project comprises a series of interlinked activities directed toward critically analyzing extraction as an industrial operation of natural resource mining and labor exploitation, investigating its ecological, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic factors and implications. Including a film series and artist lecture program—with guest presentations by practitioners such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Subhankar Banerjee, Claire Pentecost, Brian Holmes, and Elizabeth Knafo—the project also entails a number of workshops, a student-faculty reading group, field trips to regional extraction sites, and a conference. EXTRACTION will draw together artists and researchers at UCSC, and leading thinkers in the field locally, regionally, and nationally.

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WINTER QUARTER (January 6 – March 24, 2017):

LECTURE, FILM SCREENING SERIES, READING GROUP, FIELD TRIP

Artists’ Lecture and Film Screening Series

*All events are on Tuesday evenings, 5:30-7:30, in the Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 108 at UC Santa Cruz

1/17 Presentation by Matthew Coolidge (The Center for Land Use Interpretation), “Pits and Piles: Search for the Fulcrum with the Center for Land Use Interpretation”

1/24 Presentation by Ed Morris and Susannah Sayler (The Canary Project), “Water Gold Soil: The American River”

1/31 Screening of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain, 2013, with Artists’ Presentation

2/14 Screening of The Otolith Group’s The Radiant, 2012

2/21 Presentation by Subhankar Banerjee, “Why should I care about the Arctic?: Politics of Extraction & Justice in the Near North”

2/28 Screening of the following shorts videos:

-David Kelly / Patty Chang, Spiritual Myopia, 2015

-Harun Farocki, Silver and the Cross, 2010

-Sammy Baloji, Mémoire, 2006

3/7 Presentation by Elizabeth Knafo, and screening of Rare Earth, 2014

3/14 Screening of Sanjay Rawal’s Food Chains, 2014, with Presentation by Ann López (Center for Farmworker Families)

Reading Group

The Center for Creative Ecologies runs an ongoing reading group, which in Winter and Spring 2017 will look at a range of texts critically addressing extraction. More information on the reading group, which is open to students and faculty, can be found here.

 

 

 

Field Trip

Saturday, March 11 Visit the Harrisons’ Future Garden (with Newton Harrison), and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program research garden (with Rick Flores and members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band), Arboretum, UC Santa Cruz

 

 

SPRING QUARTER (March 24 – April 3, 2017): FIELD TRIP, CONFERENCE

Field Trip

Sunday, May 7 Farmworker Reality Tour in Watsonville with Ann López of the Center for Farmworker Families

Conference: EXTRACTION: DECOLONIAL VISUAL CULTURES IN THE AGE OF THE CAPITALOCENE

May 12-13 (Friday May 12 at the Multi-Purpose Room at College Nine and Ten; Saturday May 13 at the Nonviolent Resource Center)

Confirmed speakers include: Angela Anderson and Angela Melitopoulos, Caleb Ben, T.J. Demos, Nick Estes, Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost, Jason Moore, Laurie Palmer, and Anne Quirynen. More info to follow.