TRU members, Aljumaine Gayle and Ladan Siad released their new work on the connections of blackness and the Anthropocene. In their experimental video art, The Inhumanities, Aljumanie and Ladan engage with James Baldwin, Kathrine Yussof, Michael Hanchard, Wangari Maathai, and the Green Belt Movement to think about environmental justice and the principles discussed at the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.
The Inhumanities is a projection mapping video that uses technological abstraction to present some of the Black feminist narratives that address the Anthropocene. In their project, the artists contrast two different perspectives on nature, the first one being a pastoral and picturesque trope, and the second one being the Black feminist perspective on nature as the site of ecological violence and catastrophes brought by chattel slavery, colonial conquest and capitalism. Thinking through the critical work done by Black feminist thinkers, Aljumaine and Ladan offer a space for reflection on how Black feminist ecologies offer us alternatives for living in a world that goes beyond the binaries of nature and humanity. As put by the artists, “via abstraction, these videos ask how the Human is constituted by nature (and vice versa), towards planetary repair.”
You can access The Inhumanities here.
Technoscience Research Unit 