Despite Extractivism – Embodiment

In three online events, we explore the stories, ideas and practises of the Despite Extractivism contributors and the communities they engage with. The events, featuring performances, presentations and discussions, focus in turn on expanding but intersecting scales, from the body to the global. 

The first event, on 27th January, was on the theme of ‘Embodiment’. 

Taking ’embodiment’ seriously, following black & decolonial feminist thinkers, involves exploring how the body is a site through which politics is enacted.  The body is where we know the world,  where the world acts upon us, and where we act in the world. How is extractivism enacted on bodies, how is it emotionally experienced? How are these experiences unevenly experienced? Whose bodies are devalued? Whose identities are the basis of  marginalisation and dispossession?

The works curated in the Despite Extractivism exhibition engage with these questions in different registers. Some express the embodied, emotional and personal experiences of extractivism or of the other ways of being in the world, such as through relations of care and connectedness. Away from the extractive zone, art and creativity can be a way to reconnect to these realities.

In this event, we explore how particular kinds of creative  practises – which are embodied, sensory and  emotional experiences  – might evoke new sensibilities to distanced extractive realities.  Sharing participatory performances and discussion, contributing artists Arabel Lebrusan and Luce Choules invite us to explore their practises as responses to and ways of resisting extractivism:

Arabel Lebrusan. Toxic Waves II. Harvesting empathy and coping with ecological grief through drawing. 

Toxic waves II, is an online participatory drawing performance where participants are invited to draw to the beat of a metronome the shape of a wave with a repetitive line.

Luce Choules. Remembering and Forgetting the Air. 

Building ‘traces’ from fragments in their collaborative work REGOLITHIC (Choules+Roisner), Choules will perform a poetic script to voice the space of air – a visible substance circulating in our bodies and carried in our breath.

Check out the original post and the Toxic Waves Gallery at the Extracting Us Collective website.