"Territories bleed through their maps: exploring and inverting the extractive gaze"
Which images and vocabularies dictate ecological violence? What makes a ‘wasteland’? What sustains the 'extractive gaze'?
This talk, facilitated by anthropologist-artivist María Faciolince Martina and climate justice researcher Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik, will explore the ‘extractive gaze’ in an attempt to turn it on its head, through the creative piece ‘Territories Bleed Through Their Maps’. This poetic mapping exercise applies the aesthetics of neo-colonial extraction to the cities that have been built on the profits of a history of exploitation, pointing to the blatant double standards in the treatment of territories, and the logics that deem some landscapes as sites of sacrifice. Through satellite imagery and planimetric maps, we will go on a virtual expedition through the terrains of extractivism, aiming to visibilize the connections between geographic knowledge and power, and proposing a process to reverse these linkages and advance climate justice.
The talk will also introduce a broader series called In/versiones (Spanish word meaning investments and inversions), a collaborative visual-poetic account of the extractive economy.
María Faciolince Martina is an anthropologist, multimedia communicator and ecofeminist artist-activist working to shift dominant narratives around ‘development’ and climate justice. She has worked as a researcher with the EJAtlas and currently leads the Power Shifts Project at Oxfam GB, deconstructing how we communicate and think about ‘global issues’ through centring critical voices from the global South.
Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik is a campaigner, poet and researcher, working at the intersections of climate justice, historical memory, and transformative economics. He is the author of The Memory We Could Be and Partituras para el Viento, and his writing has been published in the Mays Anthology, Open Democracy and African Arguments, among others.