It often feels as though there are more frequent climate emergencies and environmental disasters than we can properly acknowledge, with consequences still to unfold. While some parties choose to profit from disaster capitalism, Özgün Eylül Işcen, Nadia Christidi and Sudipto Basu discuss their stance against catastrophic thinking.

This episode expands on the Against Catastrophe project and is part of the Planetary Design. Reclaiming Futures audio series. "Planetary Design – Reclaiming Futures" catalyses critical voices and debates on the role of design in making, unmaking, and remaking worlds. It is produced by KoozArch in partnership with Governing through Design and is supported by a Sinergia Research Grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. You can listen to episodes on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Transcript

FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI/KOOZ I am delighted to be joined today by the minds behind the Against Catastrophe initiative: Eylül Işcen, Nadia Christidi and Sudipto Basu. Thank you so much for joining me. Let's start with the title ‘Against Catastrophe’. How would you define your approach to the concept of catastrophe?

NADIA CHRISTIDI The best way to answer this would be to start off by saying that our project came out as a response to the feeling that there was a catastrophe basically happening, if not every day, then every other day, whether that was the financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, the climate crisis and environmental disasters happening within its framework. The project comes as a response to this feeling of living in an era of catastrophes, and we wanted to really critically think about, what does it mean to be living in this moment, what is specific about catastrophes within it? But also to think about, what are some of the issues with thinking through this framework? Because we found that people often talked about the present through the register of the catastrophe.

Part of the project then was responding to both this moment of catastrophe, but also this tendency to see things within the framework of catastrophe, or catastrophism. And we took issue with that for various reasons. One is that the framework of catastrophe tends to often view things as neatly packaged crises, events that have a clear beginning and end, that get disassociated from larger structures, historical conditions. We wanted to bring those back into our analysis of the present and the different things happening within it. So we came out with this idea of being ‘against catastrophe’. That was part of it, because we felt that viewing catastrophes as events, disassociating them from their context, ended up producing a reactionary approach to things, whether that was in solutions or policies or even critique, we tended to be in a position of reaction rather than response.

On the other hand, there's another thing that's come out of this emphasis on catastrophe, and that would be the speculative, anticipatory response that in some cases, not only anticipates the catastrophe or prepares for it in advance, but also sometimes profits from it. So, to position ourselves a little bit against these things, we say we're against catastrophe because we wanted to encourage a non reactionary approach to the present.

KOOZ You mentioned this idea of profit. To what extent catastrophic thinking has entrenched the status quo and contributed to the shaping of a disaster economy — that is to say, an industrial complex that profits from catastrophe?

SUDIPTO BASU Building on what Nadia already said, I think what we very crucially recognise, and this is something that has been pointed out by black radical thinkers like Bedour Allagra in her work, the interminable catastrophe. The key mistake is often in grasping catastrophe as one or a series of disastrous events, rather than a structural imposition or a foundational political concept in colonial modernity. In other words, we want to say that the catastrophe is not merely impending, not on the horizon, as much of Anthropocene discourse would have it. It has already been happening since the dawn of modernity, through the colonisation of the New World, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the plundering of colonies, destruction of ecologies, the institution of chattel slavery and forced plantation labour, and finally, the integration of the capitalist world system. Catastrophe is therefore not merely originary. It is also recursive. It has a structure of repetition, subsequent disaster events that have shaped planetary life and its inequalities draw from the consequences of an originary violence.

We can take the LA wildfires as an example. While the gutting of entire towns and neighbourhoods is no doubt tragic, public conversation tends to elide the catastrophic destruction of the complex ecologies and fire practices of the indigenous Ohlone tribes of California since the 1849 Gold Rush, denuded and terraformed California into the haven for technological and financial speculation that we now know. In the process, it also turned California into a life tender box land and its complex ties to life were reduced to property for speculation, instead of fostering resilient ecologies and rethinking organisation as we should. California's millionaires now invest in very costly private fire insurance policies, some of which in fact also come with an army of private firefighters. However, the bulk of firefighters in California that we see in images and videos are actually incarcerated black and Latino men working on slave wages. Essentially, most of them are between the ages of 18–24 years, trapped in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the ‘golden gulag’ — joining an ever expanding prison system that exists to manage so called surplus populations in the inner cities, and now, while the National Guard has been deployed not to prevent the looting — not to help with firefighting or rebuilding public systems, but to prevent the looting of private property. It's very ironic that this is the case, but it's also very symptomatic of what someone like Naomi Klein has called ‘Disaster Capitalism’. On the other hand, we see landlords increase rents up to 120% for properties that have not yet been affected by the fires, exacerbating an already existing housing crisis. Credible predictions argue that wealth disparities in California are only going to increase from this point on, as the rich corner the newer developments that will come up on the burnt real estate and securitise their own investments.

This response to the LA fires is symptomatic of the dramatic foreclosure that we notice in what we are calling catastrophic thinking, which ignores the dual structure of the originary crime and its haunting repetition over history. Instead, it is a ready example of what Klein has called the ‘shock doctrine’, in which neoliberals capitalise and prey on moments of disaster to gut remaining welfare provisions, disenfranchise the poor, racialised and disabled, destroying complex ecosystems of dependence, all the while introducing rampant speculation and profiteering on the remains through new technologies of surveillance, speculation and domination, and foreclosing the disaster into a crisis which is seemingly without history, or even without politics. Catastrophic thinking essentially makes it into a mere managerial and we might even say a necropolitical affair, which redraws again and again the boundaries between life and death; between who is considered human and who is not. Who is to be protected, who is to be dispossessed? This is enacted through what Allagra calls a ‘cruel mathematics’, involving the quantification and devaluation of black and racialised life.

Our guiding ethos in the project Against Catastrophe is to undo this foreclosure enacted by catastrophe thinking; to think of catastrophes in terms of their dual nature, as both origins and repetitions. There is a very strong historicising impulse in our work, but we also mean to think conjuncturally in the wake of catastrophe, from the position of the Left, evaluating the balance of forces that can resist this necropolitical status quo — instead of starting from scratch and imagining utopia. So we are interested in doing both the historical and the contemporary analysis. Some of the contributors across all our projects take up this challenge of doing both historical and contemporary work through very specific kinds of case studies.

KOOZ Thank you, Sudipto, for grounding and highlighting the inequalities that arise from catastrophes. I wanted to focus on this idea that you drew upon, that it seems ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. I also want to link back to the ambition of the symposium and the series of conversations hosted as part of this audio series, which discuss ‘Planetary Thinking’. In what ways is the anti-catastrophic tied to planetary thinking, and how does Against Catastrophe position itself and encourage the construction of anti-catastrophic imaginaries?

NC We referred to this statement, which Mark Fisher also mentioned — and before that, Frederick Jameson, right? Capitalism here is a stand in for many things that we can't imagine otherwise, not just capitalism itself — whether development and what a developed economy looks like, which somehow relates to capitalism, or something else. There are many ways in which the present seems to be fixed. We wanted to think about these different structures and systems — capitalism, colonialism and its aftermaths, neo-colonial relations and development: all have contributed to our present day catastrophes, right? In that case, maybe we need to radically rethink these systems, one of which is capitalism.

To put that statement in context, we wanted to support work of four different kinds; work that was considering these present day catastrophes historically, structurally and systematically. Work that situated these crises within these particular systems — colonialism, capitalism, development — understanding how certain structures have contributed to these moments. That's one type of anti-catastrophic work we support. Another strand is work that critically considers what it means to call something a catastrophe, to view something as a catastrophe in the way it's viewed today. Work that thinks critically about the disaster-industrial complex, about humanitarian aid, complex things that have come out of this ‘disaster economy’. That's the second type of work that we've supported. Thirdly, we've supported work by scholars or artists that have documented endeavors by people on the ground to propose and build alternatives to some of these systems; then work by scholars and activists that is more speculative, which defines the fourth type of work — work that is more speculative, that proposes alternatives. The reason why that lens is so important is because it provides an alternative imaginary, allowing us to actually rethink the end of certain catastrophic systems, and not just the end of the world.

KOOZ I love this idea of constructing imaginaries. Yet, as we know, just as catastrophes are unevenly distributed, so is the access to means of shaping futures. I'm really interested in understanding how you attempted to redistribute this access, and how that informed the selection of projects that you supported.

EYLÜL IŞCEN Reclaiming futures and doing it in a redistributive and sustainable way is definitely hard work, for the conditions that Nadia and Sudipto have been discussing. It was not something that we took for granted, but actually implied exploration and learning how to reflect on the mediums, formats and models for which access can be more equally distributed. We kept reflecting on conversations and approaches that we have proposed and developed, exercised in dialogue with our extended collaborators through these projects. Different forms of the project also have derived from it; that kind of gesture and commitment that is very important for us. They highlight the dialogical process that we aimed to build, embracing different sites, registers and media for research and knowledge production, with varying commitments from activism to artistic endowers.

As Nadia and Sudipto explain, there are different scales and temporalities that anti-catastrophic thinking and practice can grab; our collaborators open up those inquiries even more, actually extending through their own collaborators — because they are usually very socially engaged in art and scholarship. We try to bring these together in dialogue over several formats. I think it would be even fair to say that we aim to build some ecologies of knowledge and care through this work, as necessary in the contexts that we have been dealing with, including urgencies and emergencies as well as their structural and historical forces shaping the future — as well as our demands and imaginaries for that. We learned a lot from each other, and we believe and hope that the encounters and conversations built through this project will have their own afterlife, though long-term relations and implications.

In that sense, I would like to talk about the book that we are putting together. The edited book volume is a good example of the pre-distributive methods or approach that we try to activate, again centring around anti-catastrophic thinking in practice through all the contributions, which consist of not only scholarly and academic articles but also artistic statements and visual materials, artworks, deriving from the commissions for the project. What we tried to do is not only bring people and their different perspectives together in the book as an output itself, but to actually approach it as a process. We maintained a dialogue between all the contributors coming from different disciplines and practices throughout, by organising workshops, by exchanging ideas and feedback across different sites of knowledge production, to critically examine how different systems like colonial and neoliberal developments, expressed in design, architecture and technology, are implicated in producing catastrophic eco-social realities, so reflecting on the past and present conditions, while also using these possibilities for imagining and building alternatives: more equitable, more democratic, more sustainable futures.

As Nadia and Sudipto mentioned, we are really attempting to care about past legacies and how they are reshaping life in the present, but also how we can actually imagine and act as an alternative. The contributors engage with anti-catastrophic frameworks from their own fields and perspectives.In the book, we have political scientists and philosophers writing about the Green New Deal and eco-socialist alternatives. We also have media and infrastructure perspectives engaging with grassroots efforts to intervene in grand narratives and how they are contested and negotiated on the ground, where alternative practices and imaginaries rise up very closely, resonating with Andre Ballesteros’ idea of casual planetarities. Building relationships and conversations over time and in their regularity was important for us because amid all these crises, it's really hard to sustain dialogues and relationships — even in our workplaces, due to the precarity of academia and cultural work. We needed to build a care infrastructure through this dialogical approach.

The last point about this redistributive gesture through varied formats is that we have placed some emphasis on the ‘Global South’ especially. For instance, many artistic commissions are coming from so-called Global South locations, because we care about the catastrophes that have already happened, and how they are actually still happening. The urgencies and visibilities of these catastrophes are unevenly distributed. So we wanted to intervene in highlighting that our overall gesture was really attending to the multiplicity and complexity of these things that we are dealing with. Meaning that It's not just about a global south and north divide, but actually about different scales cutting across local, regional, global and planetary scales. We really aim to overcome this binary, techno deterministic thinking — between this topic or that, or between past or future — but rather to bring some more nuanced perspectives deriving from the practices, needs and demands across different sites, deeply resonant and structurally connected.

KOOZ While you were conceptualising Against Catastrophe, Russia invaded Ukraine. That seems to have had quite an impact in how you decided and at least shaped the project at the beginning and your understanding of catastrophe. Unfortunately, it is not the only conflict that we're living through today. We can count many others, between Gaza, Palestine, Sudan… How did that specific moment inform the project and how it has developed?

SBI think a good place to start with the answer is to realise that actually the project started even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We were actually like the project technically started in the middle of the pandemic and all the ensuing disruptions that came with it. I think we were, in general, a bit lost in trying to find a sense of common ground. How do we start to make sense of the world that we are living through? That was the thought process that we were going through at that point. And just as we were trying to envision what collective output we would first produce, did the Russian invasion of Ukraine happen? At that point, one of our former team members felt very strongly about Russian expansionism, and wanted to think about the invasion beyond the sensationalist war coverage, which is how most wars are understood cognitively through reportage. We wanted to think of the invasion in a moral sense.

In a more structural sense, we were thinking about what possible formats would allow us to explore an ongoing crisis in a somewhat timely manner — not like the usual timelines of standard academic publishing, where it might take months or even years for a book to come out. We were trying to think of the appropriate format and what would be the appropriate way of responding to something that's an ongoing crisis, but also has a long-duty structure or historicity to it. In thinking through this, we arrived at this notion of a dispatch, which takes from the idea of the frontline dispatches, but takes it in a more artistic, speculative direction. We try to explore, beyond sensationalist war coverage, what the ecologies of war are like; what its long-term causes and effects might be. What are its relationships with infrastructures and the dependencies in how war changes non-human nature. We read a lot about the human costs of war, but what about the non-human environmental costs of war? Those were the kinds of questions that we were trying to deal with.

The format of the dispatch was attractive to us because it allowed us to include standard short-form essays, but also explore non-traditional genres like photo essays, ethnographic memoirs or field reflections — even performance documentation or media. In short, I would say that Russia's war prompted us to both think of the different temporalities of catastrophe itself as a structuring concept in modernity, as a recurring event and as something that is originary, as well as the appropriate temporality and format of scholarly and artistic response.

Contributions in the first dispatch actually had quite a representative range, while essays Oleksiy Radyinski and Anna Engelhardt, for example, contextualise the war and geopolitical relations between Russia and its colonies or the former satellite states in the USSR through dependencies of energy pipelines and infrastructures. Other contributions, like photo essays by Johnny Turnbull and Katarina Novak traced the haunting effects of war ecologies on non-human inhabitants like the dogs of Chernobyl or the forest along the Poland-Belarus border catastrophe as Asia Bazdyrieva also argued in her ethnographic reflection on an abandoned Ukrainian industrial town is sensed differently by different bodies, sometimes through phantom traces that need us to slow down the relentless acceleration of catastrophic thinking and attuned to multiple temporalities, to different modes of pain. It requires us to do the careful labour of witnessing before we can even think of responding to a crisis. And I think this resonates a lot with what Eylul was saying about creating an ecology of care. So these were the kinds of thoughts that were in our minds when we embarked on this process of doing dispatches as a first step towards producing something in the Against Catastrophe project.

KOOZ That's an extremely interesting and nuanced variety of approaches and perspectives. Of course, Ukraine is the first of a number of dispatches that you produced, which also span energy, mobility and solidarity.

SB After the Ukraine dispatch, we decided to continue this format of a thematically-centred dispatch, but instead of doing it just between the four core members of the team, we opened it to guest editors who would respond to the question of catastrophe and its politics in their own different ways. The guest editors were, in fact, all members of a larger research network centered around our principal investigator, Professor Orit Halpern. Our attempt was to have a multiplicity of perspectives, even those that sometimes challenge the prompt given by the project score team by us, and therefore to give the guest editor sufficient autonomy in molding their work. I should mention that a major interlocutor across all these four dispatches, and in fact, even the online art exhibitions about which my colleagues will talk later, is our web and graphic designer Tal Halpern, who has worked closely with both the guest editors and the editor in chief to illustrate and create the templates for the against catastrophe website. I really love the attention and thoughtfulness that Tal has put into it. Now each dispatch issue builds loosely on questions that the guest editors were themselves grappling with in either their work or the larger political milieu that they were living through.

For example, the Energy dispatch — edited by Johanna Mehl and Moritz Ingwasern, who both live in Germany — began with an attempt to think of energy futures in light of the energy shortfalls triggered by Russia's war in Ukraine. So there was a continuity there, and to rethink how energy humanities tends to oscillate between euphoric joy in narratives of energy transition and catastrophic do on the other hand, but as an example of how contributors sometimes challenge the very premises of the project itself. One of the contributors, Dominic Boyer, challenged that we are at all in a moment of catastrophe in the field of energy politics, drawing instead on Aristotle’s Poetics, he argued instead that we are still in the stage of catastrophes, the part of the drama where the activity and the crux of the plot takes place, where closure is not quite there yet. Boyer basically takes the word catastrophe back to its roots within the theory of drama in Aristotle's Poetics, and says that essentially all this talk of catastrophe is also betraying a certain desire for closure or resolution, which is not there yet, and we need to stay with the trouble if you want to use Donna Harvey's very pithy phrase. Yet another dispatch on Solidarity — edited by Michelle Pfeifer — came about in part due to their own long standing work with refugee politics and migration infrastructures, but also the need to critically rethink the politics of solidarity differently. It's different modes and scales. In a moment of cascading geopolitical and ecological crisis, as you mentioned, it's not just that we are living through one war, but multiple wars. This dispatch dealt with questions of difficult or strange solidarities, of organising and world building against all odds with carceral infrastructures and how to fight.

Ironically, just as this dispatch was being edited and published, Israel's genocidal assault on Palestine began underlining the limits and possibilities of certain kinds of solidarity actions and raising the question of how we relate to the struggles of others, both closed and far away from us with an intensity that no one really could have imagined catastrophe. The word that we have stayed with throughout the project is coincidentally the most common translation of Nakba, the originary event of expulsion, in whose shadow Palestinians — and all of us, in a certain sense — are still living. A lot has been unsettled by the events of the last year and a half, and in the project team, both personally and conceptually; we're still grappling with how to deal with this question of catastrophe, and all of our project outputs are marked with this struggle to articulate how we place ourselves in a moment where nothing is really quite the same.

NC I think that we did have a little bit of a struggle around this question, when we started with Ukraine. And then we wondered, were we being reactionary? The first dispatch was a response. We decided that we should do something thematic, something that isn't necessarily a response to a particular incident. We do live in catastrophic times. It's not to deny that condition; there are catastrophes happening around us all the time. Even just talking about the last three or four years, you know, the COVID pandemic — all these things that came up through the duration of just this project alone. We're not ‘against catastrophe’ in the sense that we understand that there are catastrophes unfolding on a regular basis, and we need to be responding to them. At the same time, we want our response to be anti-catastrophic somehow. We are struggling with some of these tensions: how do you do that?

The project has three sets of things, and we're supporting these empty catastrophic positions or contributions in three different ways. We have this website — againstcatastrophe.net — that hosts these dispatches which Sudipto so beautifully described: these short-form multimedia contributions that are presented in these curated groupings which we call ‘dispatches’. We have the edited volume that Eylul mentioned, which has more scholarly contributions, artistic statements and images — but that’s a long form with a long process. Then we have this third format, which are these artistic commissions that will also be presented on our website as online exhibitions. So we've been experimenting with different formats, supporting anti-catastrophic positions or working through them, but also really grappling with some of these questions: what do we actually mean by anti-catastrophic, and how do we deal with realities that are actually catastrophic?

KOOZ I wanted to focus a little bit more on the website and understand the three online presentations of the creative project that you've supported. Could you talk a little bit about these three presentations and the commissioning process?

EI First of all, we would like to start with a general overview of how artistic commissions and dispatches come into being. So for the online exhibitions like actually, we started off with artistic commissions, and we commissioned seven works by creative practitioners, within the framing of reclaiming futures. As mentioned, we have been learning and reshaping our understanding of concepts and approaches throughout the project and through our dialogue with our collaborators. Reclaiming futures has become a meaningful concept that frames these works — especially artistic and creative works.

Maybe I can first explain how the process started. So with an invitation, various artists and creative practitioners proposed their work; we chose some of these. Over the last two years almost, they have been developing their projects in conversation with us and also other commissioned practitioners. As we mentioned, we are reclaiming futures, but we are also really embedded within historical and structural forces that would shape the means of reclaiming futures, based on extensive research, these practitioners who are Solveig, Antonia Hernandez, Dele Adeyemo, Michaela Büsse, Paulo Tavares and Studio Autônoma, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Yelta Köm and Agit Özdemir from the collective Arazi Assembly. As you can see, they're coming from and working on different parts of the world, which was a great opportunity to be in dialogue with various historical and urgent contexts. Based on extensive research, their projects run along thematic threats that integrate resource management regimes and how neoliberal operations violently remake ecosystems and life worlds; planetary organisation and urban life worlds; contemporary state-led development, settlement policies and activist solidarities — a wide range of approaches, from design research and science fiction to forensic architecture and political organising.

These projects not only witness and document such phenomena, but also raise critical questions and nuanced perspectives about urbanisms, developmentalisms and environmentalisms from below. They foreground traded ecological knowledge and relations; they contest official regimes for apprehending and managing nature and rethink value, the commons and forms of social organisation — urgently needed discussions to have in the current moment. The resulting works are forward-looking while centering the necessity of reckoning with inherited and ongoing injustice in future work; they are socially committed, while embracing the multiplicity of more-than-human ecologies and the question of planetary futures. We organised these artistic commissions in three online exhibitions, that we call artistic dispatches. The first one, Water Sovereignties, has just come out.

NC Yes, Water Sovereignties is now available online, at againstcatastrophe.net. It features the work of two of the artists that we've commissioned, Solveig Qu Suess and Antonia Hernandez. Thematically, both projects — and some of the complimentary essays we present on the site — are thinking through the question of water sovereignty. Personally (and perhaps this is because my research is focused on water), the question of who owns the rights to water, and who determines what form the future of water will take, is one of the most important questions of our time. These are some of the questions that the artworks and research that we commissioned interrogate.

Solveig Qu Suess looks at some of these contestations over the future of water in the Mekong river delta in Southeast Asia. They look at the history of hydro power development projects in particular, from the Cold War era to present day — clean energy, hydro power projects within the sustainability turn in the present — looking at some of the geopolitics around these projects, many of which are large scale and top-down. Thinking around both the impacts of these projects on riverine communities — communities that live alongside these rivers and have to inhabit the consequences of these large-scale projects and visions; about some of the the tensions between the official narratives around the health of the river versus realities that these communities live with, and some of their efforts to counter measure, to counter-narrate the implications of these projects on these rivers. So on the one hand, we have one project that's looking at large scale-infrastructure projects and their implications for the future of water.

On the other hand, Antonia Hernandez's project is a video opera focused on the Petroca Valley in Chile, an agricultural valley where a lot of avocado farming takes place, and which has been very badly hit by drought — but which has also been exacerbated by implications of avocado farming. She looks in particular at two different forms of water management: collectively run local drinking water associations and investor-owned private companies. These two different forms or approaches to Water Management are battling to control water resources in the valley, against some of the demographic, legal and infrastructural changes that have happened recently, which are enabling the increasing privatisation and financialisation of water resources. So we have two different examples from different places; projects that are documenting some of these struggles around these questions — like who owns the rights to water, who gets to determine water's future and what it might look like. These two projects are featured on the website right now, complemented by four short texts by scholars who are thinking about similar questions and sometimes similar geographies to open up some of these questions, struggles and local repercussions.

KOOZ Looking forward, could you share more about the upcoming presentations to be released on the Against Catastrophe website, and the topics and perspectives that they will explore?

EIEach dispatch has a tutorial statement and artworks as well as text contributors. The artistic dispatches are also designed by Tal Halpern. All this work comes to life through his very thoughtful, creative and generous engagement with artworks, text contributions and with us; we would thank him from here about the upcoming dispatches. We have three general thematic focuses: the first one as Nadia described, was Water s

Sovereignties, the second one will focus on Planetary Urbanisms, and the third on Dispossession by Design — especially rethinking the state, in that context. The next dispatch on Planetary Urbanisms and urban life roles, featuring works by Michaela Büsse and Dele Adeyemo. The projects and accompanying texts will take up planetary urbanism as it is shaped by development plans such as land reclamation, urban greening, real estate projects and infrastructural worlding, as well as extra-legal and more-than-human ecologies.

For instance, Michaela Büsse’s short film explores the uncanny presence of Forest City, a real estate development and man-made island on the southern tip of Malaysia. Her short film is constructed through interactions with local inhabitants, like community-led conservation organisations and locals who are actually using that space for various ends; she looks at this eerie, almost horror film setting, but how it is lively in its own ways, and how — within the cracks of this so-called ‘failed development’, different forms of life and relations continue to emerge. Dele Adeyemo’s work reflects on the rise of Lagos as a mega-city ,with implications for the larger Niger Delta. Adeyemo is concerned with how mega-city strategies often come at the expense of Indigenous practices of subsistence and paradoxically, how these very practices — such as fishing, farming and housing — enable precariously-situated communities to survive in the urban environment. Through his journey with the migrant fishing community, Adeyemo complicates the question of what constitutes and contributes to urbanism. Both projects demonstrate the processes of accumulation and dispossession and gender-diverse practices that are drawn on to navigate capitalist economies and reshape our notions of urban design and planning, especially from its peripheries.

The third artistic dispatch will be out in late spring, hopefully, on dispossession by design — meaning how design and architecture have been implicated in oppressing indigenous local communities, and how those communities then develop tools and practices that actually can resist and actually build alternative models and structures instead. It criticises state-led development, state power and neoliberal authoritarianism, but maybe more importantly, it examines how local and transnational solidarities are also built in those settings. This presentation features works by Paulo Tavares and studio autônoma, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Yelta Köm and Agit Özdemir from Arazi Assembly, with accompanying texts as well. Yelta Köm and Agit Özdemir will present a digital mapping project that explores the dispossession of communities such as the Kurds and Yazidis by Turkish state development projects, like the construction of the Ilısu Dam. The Ilısu Dam submerged the ancient city of Hasan cave, triggering mass migration in the region. Through their critical archival work and multimedia work, Köm and Özdemir are exploring the political and aesthetic dimensions of environmental degradation and migration, as well as imaginaries that go beyond the nation state frameworks.

Paulo Tavares and the autônoma team, in collaboration with the Guarani community in southern Brazil, document the displacement caused by the construction of the Itaipu dam. The team is working with the community to procure a collection of documents — in particular maps produced by the military government, which provide actual evidence of human rights violations and land exploration. Together with the Guarani advocacy agency Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa, they are developing an advocacy campaign that will include an atlas, a digital platform that narrates the case of the Guarani with spatial forensic tools, and a short documentary produced with Guarani leadership that documents the missing tekohás, referring to formal settlements taken by colonisers or lost due to damming.

Finally, Bahar Noorizadeh delves into the spectres of neoliberalism in post-revolutionary Iran, challenging conceptions of Iran as anti-capitalist. Her work delves into Iran's economic trajectory and the new workers movement that emerged in response to a privatisation push that took place following the revolution, focusing on AFAS, the oil rich Arab populated southern region. Her work draws on archival research, in conversations with former planning and central bank officials, along with personal conversations with Arab-Iranian labour organisers in exile. As you can see, the projects across these three dispatches really come from different contexts, different histories, different mediums, approaches and methods. We really hope to express that complexity by bringing them into dialogue and by presenting them through these different formats.

KOOZ Thank you for sharing with us the richness of this initiative — it's really quite a phenomenal compendium of perspectives, which span so many topics and geographies in such a generous way.

Bios

Sudipto Basu is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University, Montreal. His doctoral research historicizes the intersection of media experiments and developmental projects during the Cold War in rural India, against the backdrop of global decolonization and emerging postcolonial politics. He is a research associate on the SNSF-funded project Against Catastrophe and a member of the Global Emergent Media Lab, Concordia. His research has been published in various journals like Media Fields, APRJA, and IIC Quarterly, and edited volumes like Platforms and the Moving Image (meson press, forthcoming).

Nadia Christidi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University in NYC. She holds a PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society form MIT. Her doctoral research explores how cities in drylands, including Los Angeles and Dubai, are imagining and planning for the future of water as the climate changes and their established ways of sourcing water become increasingly untenable. Nadia is also an arts practitioner whose multimedia research projects have been presented at the Sharjah Art Biennale, Jameel Arts Centre, Beirut Art Center, and SALT in Turkey, among other places.

Özgün Eylül İşcen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Schaufler Lab at Technische Universität Dresden. She earned her PhD in the Program in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University. Her research explores the geopolitical aesthetic of computational media, connecting urban and environmental struggles with media histories and artistic practices. Eylül has published widely in edited volumes, academic journals, and art catalogues. Most recently, she co-edited Displacing Theory Through the Global South (ICI Berlin Press, 2024) with Iracema Dulley.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.