ADS8: Anatomies of Ecological Bodies – Assemblages of Coloniser and Colonised

Ecologies are assemblages of integral relationships between bodies. Bodies are bits of matter and energy that unite to become humans and microbes, ponds and planets, communities and worlds.

Colonialism operates by applying the force of segregation to ecological bodies, which are put to work against their own interests. Through its cosmology of ‘Extractivism’, a worldview that holds capitalist accumulation as its core value and segregation as its driving force, colonial agents transform complex more-than-human systems into profit-making apparatuses, producing the grid, the plantation, the nature reserve, and the wilderness.

In their own defence, the more-than-human constituents of colonised ecologies exert forces of resistance through collaboration across species, generations, and dimensions, reintegrating bodies and value through such forms as the palaver tree, the garden plot, and the sacred grove. Indeed, ecological bodies are unique spheres of research in that they are at once sites of, witnesses to, and actors in, political instrumentality, violence, and resistance.

Taught by

Margarida Waco

Imani Jacqueline Brown

Meriem Chabani

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Image: The River Forgetfulness. Still. Sofia Perteagudo Yanez