Well, thank you very much, everyone. We're excited to be back in the affirmations sessions. I want to say thank you to everyone that is taking part of this session, and also everyone that is following. I see Jack that also will be speaking later in the semester here in one of the sessions. Just for those that are new in affirmations, we're basically trying to affirm here as we interrogate also what are the forms of, what are the ways of being political through and as the disciplines of the built environment. What is the way that that's also conversation that architects, planners, designers are not having alone, but it's also concerning other fields. And what are the new or the different, the dissident, the relevant ways of reacting to the failure and operating in the cracks of modernity and the culture of extractivism, colonialism, ableism, and we could go on patricates, anthropotentries, and we could add some that we're discussing these days. But basically there's something that is emerging in these cracks. There's new notions. And we see these sessions as an opportunity also to reset conversations, the conversation of what's the status of the future in design practices, what do we mean by decolonizing architectural practices, what is the notions of time that are relevant to discuss now in facing environmental crisis and disasters. And I'm very happy that we can have this conversation with Rob Nixon. And Barth will be doing a formal presentation, but I want to say how important your work is in this building, how much, how present it is in the syllabi of many of the courses and how many people here at students and faculty are discussing, for instance, slow violence in the environmentalism of the poor and what it means, the notions of times that you're bringing to understanding the built environment and definitely Samia Henni, which I feel is very much in conversation with your work as well through the question of the architecture, the French architecture of radiation and, of course, something that resonates also with the work of many people here, like Marwa Ciudad and here also being part of these sessions. And the very recent work on deserts are, the book, Deserts Are Not Empty, that Samia edited, and I work here with Columbia Boobs. I'm incredibly happy that Reinhold Martin and Kallarister Lynn are with us in part of this discussion. Of course, their work are deeply connected to this, and I feel that also you two are already in conversation with Rob Nixon and Samia Henni. And without more, I invite everyone to take notes. This is meant to be a conversation, and that's why we're staging it like this circle. And I would like to ask you, everyone, to really think what is the way that you would like to continue to the debate afterwards. Okay, welcome, everyone, and welcome back, I should say, to what is the first information of this new year, and we're incredibly excited to have Samia Henni and Rob Nixon join us tonight together with Kallarister Lynn and Reinhold Martin, who will deliver the first questions and response. Samia had to switch to a remote presentation, so she's not here on stage with us, as you can see, but she's very much present and will be part of the discussion and join us via Zoom. And as always, I want to welcome not only you who are present in the room, but also all of you who join us remotely on GSEP's YouTube channel, and especially also the members of our planetary cohort of respondents, who are, as in the previous five affirmations, joining us across many different continents and time zones. So good night, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to all of you. My name is Bartjean Poelman. I'm the director of exhibitions and public programming here at GSEP. And the intention of this series or this project, I should say, which we call affirmations, is to develop a platform for discussions that are transdisciplinary, engaged with all aspects of the built environment, and crucially understand the built environment not through isolated or autonomous objects, but rather as operating at the intersection of multiple networks, ecosystem scales, and especially pertinent, I would say, in the context of the incredible work and of tonight's speakers across multiple temporalities as well. And as the title suggests, this series is meant to affirm possibilities, possibilities for ecosystems, societies, and worlds to come, discuss through the built environment, and as emerging from the ruins of manifold contemporary crises and violences, as emerging from the cracks in the structures of power built on the interdependency of carbonization, extractivism, colonization, racialization, anthropocentrism, inequality, patriarchy, and technocracy. And it is a project that therefore should also really be seen in its, or understood rather in its totality, and just to illustrate that, I want to recall here the very first session we had with Olalekan Jafus and T.J. Deimos on radical futurisms in which the politicization of time played such a crucial role. And in their futurisms, Olalekan and T.J. radically sort of rejected the privileged access to hegemonic time, and the urgent need to articulate new forms of solidarity which Deimos then following Angela Davis and Marx called an ecology of connectedness. And for tonight's speakers in different ways, the notion of time is also crucial. For example, in what Samia calls the longstanding temporality of colonial toxicity, which operates alongside the violent spatiality of France's colonial project in the Sahara, including the testing of France's first atmospheric bombs. Rob Nixon in his seminal book, Slow Violence, calls for the need to recognize, and I quote, a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and decorative, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. And I quote, and understood spatially as we are in a school of architecture and planning, such as slow violence often amounts to what is often called, calls displacement without moving. And Nixon offers a clear distinction between a media savvy spectacular time and an unspectacular time for which it is much harder to get media attention in part because it lacks the spectacle, but also and this is crucial because it operates across a multitude of scales ranging from the cellular to the transnational and it's precisely this aspect of Nixon's work that Samia Hany highlights in the introduction Deserts Are Not Empty, in order to show how difficult it is to maintain media attention to the various temporalities of coloniality and toxicity. So that's why I think it's so great to have both of them speak together here today because both operators, I would say as writer activists, a public role whose importance is carefully emphasized and unpacked by Nixon in his work in and beyond the ecological humanities and because both fundamentally deal with the question of who counts as a witness in regimes of slow violence in which the production of toxicity is embedded in the mechanisms of coloniality, environmental depths are spatialized and a locked door, as Rob Nixon mentioned, a locked door can be a weapon. So we will start with a talk by Rob followed by Samia and as I mentioned during prior affirmations, this is not a lecture or two lectures followed by a panel, affirmations wants to be a planetary conversation, so the presentations will be brief and we'll have a response first from Keller and then from Reinhold before we open it up to the audience and the planetary cohort and we'll end around 8.15, 8.20 New York time. So now for the formal introductions Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and scholar and a Baron family professor in the environmental humanities at Princeton University. He has published four books, most recently and is slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor and his book Blood at the Root, Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times and his writing is also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, The London Review of Books, The Village Voice and elsewhere. He has been the recipient of an NEH Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim one which he declined and you have been awarded Residencies as a number of artist colonies and much of his writing engages environmental justice struggles in the global south. Samia Hennie is a historian of the built, the destroyed and the imagined environments. She's the author of the multi-award winning Architecture of Counter Revolution, The French Army in Northern Algeria and Colonial Toxicity rehearsing French Radioactific Architecture and the Landscapes in the Sahara. She's the editor of Desist Are Not Empty and she's also the maker of several exhibitions including performing Colonial Toxicity which is currently on view at Framer Framed in Amsterdam for those of you who are around and then will travel afterwards. Her teaching and research interest as well as her exhibitions are centered around the intersection of architecture with questions of colonization, displacement, gender, resource extraction and wars. And currently she is an invited visiting professor at ETH in Zurich and this summer Samia will join the faculty of McGill University School of Architecture in Montreal. We're also incredibly happy to have Keller Easterling here who needs a little introduction but is a designer, writer and the Ended Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at GL University. She's the author of many, many books including the most recent Medium Design and Extra Statecraft which I highly recommend. And Easterling lectures and exhibits internationally and her research was included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennials among many other exhibitions and I also want to highlight the new project of Trust Lands which she recently presented at EFLUX. I'm very much looking forward to how that develops. And Randall Martin is a historian of architecture and media, a professor here at GSEP and chair of Columbia's Committee on Global Thought. An author of numerous books, Martin has studied the material and cognitive infrastructures of cultural, technological and political economic modernity and he was also a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Grey Room. And before we want to get started I quickly want to thank Lola Ben-Alon and the Natural Materials Lab for producing these incredible stools for the series that are made of a sort of 3D printed natural fibers. And I want to thank Clarissa Figueiredo who is helping us through the multiple questions from the Planetary Cohort and Erisa Nakamura who will help facilitate questions from the audience. So with that, let's get started. Great. Well, thanks so much Andres and Bart for setting this up and I'm very grateful to Keller and Reinhardt for particularly the beginning of the semester agreeing to be respondents. And I'm grateful to Lucy and Chris and everybody else in the team who have made this event possible. So I hope I will have enough affirmation in the cracks but it's a very iconoclastic series and I really am intrigued by the format and fascinated by the generative fields that you're bringing together. So I thought what I'd do it can be a strange thing going back to a book and what I thought I'd do was to do something which I didn't do in the book which was to think through the visualization of slow violence so the book, Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor was very much focused on the figure of the literary witness people working in the cusp between social movements and literary testimony particularly non-fiction and so what I thought I'd do today is reflect on a few images where I feel like the relationship between dramatic event the violence of dramatic event versus the violence of slow process is addressed by different visual artists. So Slow Violence is a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight a violence of delayed destruction is dispersed across time and space and attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all So primarily in the book I'm addressing it in terms of climate breakdown thawing glaciers oil spills, toxic drift radioactive aftermath of war acidifying oceans but it clearly is applicable also to domestic violence if we think also of football and soccer stars players who have serial head injuries, concussions and that, cumulatively that makes them more prone to various forms of dementia and so forth so people have also used that concept in that kind of context Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be inhabitable While that quote has a contemporary resonance it was actually JFK in 1961 and what he was referring to was this which is the charismatic mushroom cloud if we think back to 2003 Condoleezza Rice saying if we don't invade Iraq we can expect the spectacle of the mushroom cloud hanging over America so it was a very readily invoked image of conflagration and so in contrast to that if we think of that as the primary kind of cataclysmic fear in the second half of the 20th century or the first quarter of the 21st century if we think of climate breakdown as the paradigmatic or most prominent fear it is a much more diffuse notion of calamity or apocalypse it's both dispersed in its impacts over space and dispersed in its impacts over time so if we think of say both climate breakdown and broadly environmental toxicity what we're typically looking at is something closer to this which is if you recall in the 2010 Deep Horizon oil spill Correxit was sprayed at night over the oil spill in an attempt to degrade it and Correxit is a highly toxic substance that has been banned in the EU for a very long time and so in the top left corner you can see the sort of raspberry coloured area and that's where the Correxit and the oil have bonded and the point about Correxit was not that it would reduce the toxicity of the oil but that it would lower it in the water so it was no longer visible so the primary function of it was actually to reduce visibility so this is the first phase and then it sinks so we can contrast that with say the image of the Deep Horizon rig exploding the conflagration that set off that which killed I think 17 people rig workers but the long delay of the aftermath was compounded actually by the toxicity so in 2001 BP changed its logo to the Sunburst logo and it declared that it was no longer British petroleum it was now beyond petroleum so there was a very concerted image on the part of the corporation to green there was a futuristic meaning of the corporation which didn't last very long but in the context of the Gulf oil spill this was one of the works that came up using the backdrop of the Sunburst and then alluding to Eddie Adams famous image from the Vietnam War where South Vietnamese general executed a Viet Cong captive and so here what we have is both an image of complicity at the gas pump that we're implicated in this and also an incredible compression of the temporal effects of extreme petroleum dependence so there's a temporal compression and also an attempt to accentuate the violence or if you like to gather the violence into a single event so the process becomes refigured as an event so how have different artists and filmmakers addressed this question of the violence of the Long Duray in aesthetic terms so one example that stood out for me was Josh Fox's film on the rise of fracking Gasland and what he did was he went around from Wyoming to Texas to Pennsylvania, various other states and got local people to take a lighter to the faucet and so this is what resulted and the film is started with these images it's really the primary visual effect that we take away from the film clearly combustible water is never a good look particularly when it's in something as quotidian as the as a kitchen tap so again I think there's something very invisible about the threat posed by hydrofracking but also in particular what is invisible are the chemical cocktails that seep into the aquifer itself and then reemerge through the faucet so going from fire to ice this was at COP21 so we had an artist and a geologist collaborating on IceWatch so it has a double valence the section of a small piece of glacier was transported to Paris from Greenland and carved up into these segments in the shape of a watch so obviously in the more temperate climate of Paris these ice residues melted very quickly so you have an acceleration of the process of ice loss and you also have the image of the clock of time running out similarly with a double valence also from COP21 the sculpture, ice sculpture of a polar bear was a way of alerting people to the endangerment of polar bears as sea ice melted but also given that the sculpture itself started rapidly melting it sort of references the medium as endangered as well so ice itself is endangered and so you have an interdependence between the threat to the polar bear and the threat to the ice flows and ice sheets on which they're dependent so we could say, you know, is the six extinction a kind of slow violence and various people have written about it have written in these terms if we think of Tom Van Duren writing about the dull edge of extinction where a Subramanian extinction is whispering death it's one of the paradoxes of this extinction that it's extremely consequential but it's very often only realized retrospectively when people look and look for a creature and can no longer find it so extinctions are silent and attritional and both eventful and low in drama if you like or very hard to turn into spectacle so in slow violence and environmentalism I had a section in the beginning on the Anthropocene which at that point was just really an emergent paradigm but now is a kind of pervasive set of structures of thought and so I thought I'd revisit that in relation to some represented artists particularly Jason DeKerris Taylor and this series of his underwater series is called the Anthropocene and so in this particular image you've got a very ambiguous figure here it's hard to tell whether this figure is in grief is sleeping whether there's been a collision whether they're hiding their eyes in order not to see what's happening and to me it's a kind of a visual reference or visual illusion to Pompeii where you had the the freezing of time of the human torsos in their of people in their final activities now obviously in the case of a volcanic explosion you've got both extreme visibility and extreme suddenness and so in the Jason DeKerris Taylor instance what you have here is a visual sleight of hand because the car crash if you like caused by our carbon dependent COT dependent cultures is actually is a nutritional process and so with this particular figure there would be biological decay not the kind of petrification that you get in the Pompeii example so these are happening at very different speeds but what I see Jason DeKerris Taylor trying to do here is to say let's condense this in temporal terms like this image of calamity clearly dramatized now in a later image from that same series he has these two figures looking down at the vehicle and you know they're clearly scuba divers but they have a kind of an otherworldly force and so I read the distance between those surface figures and the car as a temporal distance not just a spatial distance so they're like observers from the future looking at the future remains that we are currently constituting through our consumerism, through our actions and so he's using the light the surface light to create a kind of a transcendent aura as well they have an almost angelic I think resonance and it called to mind for me Walter Benjamin's thesis on the philosophy Ninth thesis on the philosophy of history where Benjamin writes where we perceive a chain of events the angel of history sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet the angel would like to stay awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed but a storm is blowing from paradise it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them the storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward the storm is what we call progress and so to me that is very redolent of this image of the storm of progress as a cumulative phenomena the chain of events that is perceived as a single catastrophe so just before the Copenhagen COP summit the then president of the Maldives Muhammad Nasheed did this bit of underwater theater where he had so the Maldives the highest point in the Maldives is like seven foot so this is one of the island nations that is in the front lines of disappearing possibly by around to 2070 by current predictions and so you know it's a small island with very little international resonance but also an island state that has been traumatized by the prospect of inundation so what he does here is in a kind of a theatrical way he assembled his cabinet in the scuba gear and they signed into law a commitment to being carbon neutral within 10 years but you can see the sort of the Gothic hair using the pool of the water and the idea of inhabiting 2050 or 2070 and trying to give our current actions a retrospective ethical and political force now as with the Jason de Keres Taylor figure on the car here there is a kind of a sleight of hand because all of these low-lying island nations they are going to become uninhabitable through salinity before they become uninhabitable through disappearance or inundation so basically the saltwater rises or either pollutes the aquifer or pollutes salinates areas where crops are grown and so it becomes uninhabitable before it disappears but it's the disappearance that is the dramatic act that's what can help create a sense of emotional urgency salination is a much more difficult thing I think to animate in this way so with the movement for black lives and the COVID pandemic in both those instances a really strong focus on breath and the thing about breath is that it is highly symbolic people talk about somebody sucking the oxygen out of a room and I can't breathe a dead metaphor brought to life by the movement for black lives but also it's a matter of great physiological urgency so we breathe 25,000 times a day all of us have had some experience of gasping or of feeling threatened having our breath threatened and so this particular the physiology of breath the police politics of breath and also the question of air pollution in some sense converge now this is an image from protests by students at university well before COVID and the mask was being used in various art forms as a protest against the terrible quality of virtually unbreathable quality of Beijing air at the time and so here the mouth is both the aperture through which we breathe but also the aperture through which we speak and so the X over the mouth and interestingly some on the right use similar iconography during the antivaxis we're using similar iconography during the COVID crisis but this was pre-COVID and so it was a protest both against censorship and against unbreathable air and it reminded me of this photograph from the early days of COVID of these makeshift medical camps where you had this plastic drop cloth in this case separating a daughter from her mother during the height of COVID so the mask becomes a surface of protest and it has this multivalent dimension to it and what's interesting about I can't breathe is even though Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry as a slogan circulated very widely internationally I can't breathe and we can't breathe circulated even more broadly into places where there are very few black people for instance and so whether you're in Delhi or Cairo or Jakarta there was a lot of street art around people identifying with this particular rallying cry so this is from the Indian magazine Outlook this is George Floyd in the West Bank on the separation wall there and this is from Cape Town on the highway that connects the Cape Town airport where all the tourists come in and the Central City and on that highway the municipal government had built these walls purportedly to prevent drunk inhabitants from crossing the highway and getting hit but you have these favelas or shanty towns on either side of the wall I mean on both sides of the highway we have these walls and so this work of street art had a variety of resonances you had the pollution coming from the heavily used highway itself you have very close to the shanty town a huge coal-fired plant so that was also contributing to very high asthma rates and unbreathable air and as in so many poor communities around the world there was also asphyxiating policing so very, very brutal policing of the poor on the outskirts of the city so I wanted to close with this image again an Anthropocene image by the Spanish muralist Sam 3 and to me this really is a very condensed image of the percolation of slow violence over time so you have a surface act of tree felling or deforestation and you have the percolation of the impact down through the body of time which is also the living body of the land itself through the the aorta of the land if you like and there's also the sense in which the social body which is not separate from the ecological body and crucially here and I think very effectively we have a sense of the continuity of the life of the forest and the life and the human form the torso beneath so that deforestation is represented as self-decapitation as a kind of species suicide but so anyway those are some samples of the ways in which visual artists have tried to condense time in order to heighten the violent element within it. Thank you. Yes, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Ok, just to confirm thank you so much so hello everyone thank you very much for the introduction and the invitation to be part of this conversation with Rob Nixon whose work has been inspirational thanks to Andres Bart, Lucille Keller, Reinhold and all the individuals who were and are involved in this event. I think what you did Bart in the introduction makes a lot of sense and I will reiterate this connection also with Rob's work. What I would like to do is to practice the objective of this lecture series affirmation and thereby I will affirm the ramifications of climate colonial climate slash colonial for me there are very much related regimes in historic and contemporary terms I will affirm it through colonial toxicity and its performativity in the present times in the Sahara and around the world I will also ask ourselves to oppose and think about a few ethical questions such as why we failed and keep failing to oppose colonialism and the killing of human and non-human lives. Let's do so through the practice of rehearsing the term comes from the 13th century old French Re-Hersier which means literally to rake over turn over the soil ground to drag trail on the ground be dragged along the ground to rake herroland rip, tear, wound repeat, rehearse thanks to Anik Fogier from If I Can Dance who reminded us of this definition I must affirm and rehearse today because I believe that we cannot afford ethically, humanly, socially economically, legally and environmentally to remain silent to support censorship to back the suspension suspension of anti-colonial anti-war associations including student associations watched the killing of thousands of humans in Gaza continue to pretend to pretend advocating for justice without justice decolonization without decolonization and to pretend promoting diversity, equity and inclusion without diversity, equity and inclusion. I condemn this act including the recent reported spraying of toxic chemicals on protesters at Columbia University few days ago what a violent word we keep experiencing I'm speaking here as an anti-colonial scholar and as a human being with basic ethical values as well as someone who was the subject of bodily experiences of hate crimes in the US I believe that we are all responsible and that people will not forget Bart talked about the notion of witness I think this is very important for me as well so to do so I will move between different times and spaces I will use images from my recent book Colonial Toxicity that Bart mentioned and also images from the exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity everything is related and I will make it or I will try at least to make it clear I will end with a voice that reiterates that people will not forget Colonialism is toxic this toxicity is anthropogenic human made it is irreversible enduring and destructive it has far reaching and long lasting consequences this manuscript rehearses fragments of these consequences called Colonial Toxicity it focuses on the specialties and temporalities of the French nuclear weapons program in the colonized Algerian Sahara during and after the Algerian Revolution or the Algerian War of Independence that happened between 1954 and 1962 France's atmospheric and underground nuclear bombs were detonated in the Sahara between February 1960 and February 1966 it didn't stop in 1966 since as Rob mentioned with this notion of slow violence with the temporality of toxicity it continued and it's still contaminating the lives of humans and non-humans in the Sahara to carry out its confidential nuclear weapons program the French colonial regime built two military bases in the Algerian Sahara the CSEM the Saharan Center for Military Experiences in Regen approximately 1150 km south of Algiers and the SEMU or the Oasis Military Testing Center in Inaker about 600 km south of Algiers whereas the CSEM was designed to host 10,000 civil and military personnel expected to work on the detonation of elements of atmospheric nuclear bombs the SEMU was conceived for roughly 2,000 people and for the underground atomic bombs an estimated 20,000 people civil and military have worked or served in the Sahara nuclear bases between 1960 and 1966 it is unclear whether the Saharan people who worked on the construction of the CSEM and the SEMU and the firing tunnels are included in this estimation however the French colonial regime estimated that a sedentary population of 40,000 lived in the area where the atmospheric bombs were detonated they mainly occupied the Oasis of Regen and the Tuat Valley north of Regen in this estimate there is no mention of the nomadic and semi-nomadic population of the Algerian and other parts of the Sahara the atomic bombs spread radioactive fallout across Algeria, Central and West Africa and the Mediterranean including southern Europe and caused irreversible contamination whereas the word speciality refers to the territories, places and spaces above and below the ground of colonial toxicity the term temporality points to the status of their existence over time in the past, present and future the book offers abundant visual evidence and that cannot and should not be overlooked or unseen it prioritizes images over texts making the images portray the production and propagation of radioactivity and exposes the special effects of France's nuclear bombs program in the Sahara whose institutional archives are still classified the historical details and ongoing impacts of this nuclear history remain largely unexposed, tenaciously hidden by the French state behind the wall of red ink top secret stamps the official archives is those mostly marked by its holes breaks and absences the visuals and the stories they carry form a reproducible corpus of some of the French military silenced records whose devastating health, special and environmental consequences are no secret but if we all agree that these consequences are devastating how come that some of us cannot call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza? how come that some of us cannot stand for human rights, international law, special and environmental justice the devastating health special, economic, social psychological and environmental consequences of the bombing of Gaza are no secret some every day and every night some of that, some of us look away, some of us ignore them some of us avoid them some of us lie about them some of us justify them there is no justification to colonial toxicity there is no justification to bombing cities and territories and killing civilian human lives there is no justification to violence to oppose and expose colonial toxicity I have conceived the exhibition performing colonial toxicity it was first presented at Framer Framed in Amsterdam between October 7 2023 and January 14 2024 it will travel to any institution interested in it until the French and Algerian governments will be forced to decontaminate the radioactive sites and affirm their complicity in colonial toxicity between brackets next stops will be London and Zurich both opening in March produced in collaboration with If I Can Dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution the exhibition creates a series of audio visual assemblage which trace the special atmospheric and geological impacts of French atomic bombs in the Sahara as well as its colonial vocabulary and the afterlife of its radioactive debris and nuclear wastes taking on an architectural scale this station as I refer to them are meant to be moved through and engaged with visitors are invited to draw their own connection between what is present in the in the isolation as well as what is absent from it experimenting with different modes of specializing and circulating suppressed information the project three structure the book exhibition and testimony constitutes a call to action to open the still classified archives and to clean the decontaminate the sites both crucial steps for exposing the past's presence and futures of colonial toxicity it shed light it sheds light on the redacted history of French nuclear colonialism in the Algerian Sahara and draws attention to the urgency of reckoning with this history and its lived environmental and social political impacts it also engages with opposing colonial vocabulary the vocabularies and with naming radioactive matters and wastes colonial vocabularies belong to what Roland Bach French literally theorists linguists and semi-autistic revolution has called écriture cosmetic cosmetic writing whose scope is not to communicate but rather to intimidate as illustrated in architecture of counter-revolution cosmetic writing is an integral part of the colonial project in 1957 during the infamous battle of Algiers where liberation fighters were tortured and killed Roland Bach published a book Mythology mythologies in his chapter titled Gramer african african grammar Bach argued that the official terminology that the colonial representatives used during the Algerian revolution or the Algerian war of independence belonged to the semantic category of cosmetic writing a mask that was designed to divert attention from the nature of the world and cover real facts with a noise of language according to Bach this grammar was both ideologically burdened and politically loaded in this context he defined the term war as follows and uncoting war the aim is to deny the thing for there are two ways either to name it as little as possible the most common method or to give it the meanings of its own antonym a more devious method which is the basis for almost all of the mystifications of bourgeois language war is then used in the sense of peace and pacification in the sense of war this practice of denying the thing or giving it the meaning of its antonym is thriving in this game in these days again when it comes to the bombing of Gaza the destruction of homes schools universities hospitals libraries archives cemeteries and so on the evidence is there why can some of us not name it why are some of us so afraid of denouncing colonial oppression why have some of us failed to make colonial and imperial institutions accountable for the contaminations of territories including their waters plants and air and for killing for the killing of lives and the destruction of cities to oppose colonial vocabularies imposed by the French colonial state we created the testimony testimony translation project managed by Megan from if I can dance it consists of a selection of victims and survivors testimonies that were made digitally available in their original language the Mazeera French as well as in the translation or English translations and here I want to think all the people who are listed here on the slide who have been crucial in helping in translating the testimonies from French into English this is really a collaborative project and this project would not have been possible without their tuition support the witnesses the witness accounts a range of voices including Algerian voices from Saharan inhabitant that worked at either the atomic base in Ergen or Eneke or from their extended families and communities network as well as French voices military and civil personnel stationed in one of the two French bases the testimonies of the victims who lived in the Sahara or worked for the French army covered numerous topics including the working conditions contract terms lack of protection during and after the detonation of the nuclear bombs lack of information about the impact of the atomic weapons diseases and symptoms that they are suffering from memories of the explosions dangers they faced after the explosions the invisibility of radioactivity lack of trust in the French and Algerian authorities arable lands that had been or become unproductive widespread infertility in the region lack of medical follow-up living and with fear and death the voices and bodies the lives and deaths of Algerian workers were excluded from the news broadcast released by the French after the detonation of the first atmospheric bomb in 1960 the black and white moving images portrayed mainly French men wearing white suits gloves boots and gas masks the thousands of the Saharan people who helped produce the irreversible contamination of their own land without their knowledge and consent were deliberately erased from the histories, stories and narratives about French colonial atomic weapons the imposed amnesia denial and erasure of facts and events are part of what colonial regimes have been doing and are still doing today the aim is not only to control narratives and alter them but also to spread misinformation in the last few months a number of organizations and individuals have repeatedly demanded to stop the misinformation of colonial and imperial regimes a few months ago architects and planners against apartheid called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza called to publicly condemn violations of academic freedom and freedom of speech and called on us to support students faculty and staff calls letters and educational programs for justice and oppose retaliation boxing, bullying, surveillance and misinformation these are basic ethical demands that should not be contested the specialties and temporalities of colonial and climate regimes must be stopped as Rob Nixon argued in his book slow violence and Bart mentioned it in his introduction I will just repeat it here for the sake of rehearsing maintaining media attention on the temporalities of toxicities challenging I quote not only because it is spectacular deficient but also because the fallout's impact may range from the cellular to the transnational and depending on the specific character of the chemical or radioactive hazard may stretch beyond the horizon imaginable to mine victims, veterans, journalists filmmakers, poets, writers activists and a handful of anti-nuclear politicians have revealed the imposed exposure of human lives and built natural environments to radioactivity after years of struggle and perseverance the French authorities ultimately recognized their right and adopted the law in 19 in 2010 on the recognition and compensation of the victims of French nuclear tests however the persons suffering from radiation induced pathologies must have resided or stayed and I am quoting here either between 13 February 1960 or 31st of December 1967 at the Saharan military experiment on the peripheral zones of these centers the vagueness of the term peripheral zones is concerning especially to the size and direction of nuclear clouds dust and ashes moreover this law does not recognize the temporality of radioactivity of the victims of French nuclear tests this law does not recognize the temporality of radioactivity the production of radioactive environments and landscapes the nuclear waste that the French left behind in the Saharan and the unrestricted circulation of radioactive materials that the French authorities did not fully contained to acknowledge the acknowledgement of the scale locations and times of French exposure of the Algerian Saharan and African bodies lives and environments to radiation must be revised and updated colonial toxicity is at once an assembly of images an assemblage of voices and a repository of sources it is organized around specific themes that congregate, connect, relate scale and juxtapose various sets of visual accounts the practice of searching, scanning photographing, gathering saving, assembling, indexing arranging and rearranging the visuals is a form of writing it writes the production of radioactivity it writes the causes of radioactivity it writes the symptoms of radioactivity it writes the effects of radioactivity it writes the architecture of radioactivity it also writes what the French authorities deem top secret I would like to conclude with a testimony of Aisha she did not forget what happened to her her people and her land in the 1960s when the French detonated the French bomb close to her village called Mertutek in the Algerian Saharan without informing the people she was 10 years old she did not forget she even said that this is the only story that she can tell the deadly conditions of the population of the village of Mertutek and their animals and environment after the village was covered and surrounded by radioactive by a radioactive cloud resulting from the bomb the residents of this village are still suffering from the presence of radioactivity she did not forget and their bodies are carrying colonial toxicity and transmitting it to the future generations I am Fifa I believe you must have the luck to watch my videos and learnt how theyInto becoming Sari'a and also. If she does not forget that! Do not forget it is, if others do not do otherwise A lot of tribes were leaving, but we just had to wait and see. People were trying to earn their living and they didn't have enough time to work. We had to wait and see what was happening. I'm not a mother, but I am a son of God. My two children are Lord Jesus. I have no father, but I am a son of God. I was born and raised by him. I've been a mother for twenty years now. I haven't reached the border yet. This is a different situation. A different situation. I have talked with the telecommunications department for this situation. That situation is not the same as it used to be. The situation is different. I have no idea what is going on in this situation. Hmm. It has changed. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, thank you Samya. I thank you, Rob, for both of you for your presentations and also for your work at LARDS that resonates on so many levels. I would like to ask Keller to ask the first questions. Well, thank you. Yes, it's been a pleasure to go back to re-read your works, Rob Nixon and Sami Henning, and maybe the responsible thing to do would be to ask a question that reflects the depth of that work. But I'm just too curious to get your reflections about some other emergent forms of narrative. You've both found such vivid examples in narrative and media that instantly communicate the non-event, the invisible, the long temporal dimension, as well as the depravity of some forms of structural and slow violence. Sami, for you, this colonial toxicity is multiple forms of invisibility. There's the thumping, careless litter of nuclear experiments that are powerful enough to melt glass that are the same as hurling bombs in Gaza that are treated as if they're somehow just conveniently out of the dominant sight lines, or that they're easily obscured with lies. Well, Rob Nixon, you have many examples. Waqari, Mangai, Matai, the Maldives Underwater Cabinet that you showed, the gas land igniting the kitchen tap with a big glider, or animals people, the character for whom the passage of time doesn't provide any healing, but provides fresh forms of misery. That's the way that time works. But then again, after more than a decade of working with these ideas, and you were at work, and Sami, we've been thinking about these things expressed in spatial languages, thinking about them as designers and practices. So I'm wondering if we're not at a kind of multi-forked, multi-pronged fork in the road with these narratives. First of all, the overwhelming sense that there's still 500 years of abusive patterns of white, modern enlightenment, thinking that remain to be vividly exposed. But in another persuasion, and I'm kind of following Olafemi Otaioho here, might say that exposure is not enough. I mean, since these patterns of harm will only continue addressing future climate threats is inextricably linked to redressing historic damage with reparations, that there's nothing but reparations that we're doing. But are the narrative forms that are associated with our activism often only reproducing the dispositions of the last 500 years? If classic narratives linked persuasion and action with war, manifesto, revolution, what narratives do we have that aren't reproducing that same enlightenment, thinking, but instead inspiring countless inconsistent patchy, non-solutionist projects, powerfully multiplied gradients of change? I guess what I'm asking is, what is the utterly different shape of those narratives? Would they take the shape of some emerging planetary forms of sovereignty and solidarity that are both situated and atomized locally under siege, like Palestine, like Ukraine, but diasporatically linked to allies? Again, what is the utterly different shape of those narratives? That's enough of a difficult question, but I want to add one more prong to the, no one more fork in the road. And I want to ask, what sort of narratives are not only exposing the blowback from chemical atmospheres and invisible things, but are actually infiltrating the equally consequential political persuasions that are doubling down on their loyalty to abusive power now? So our narratives inspire environmental activism that often speaks to the already persuaded with yet more nuance, yet more precise measurements of our doom, but might there be some brave and impure and sneaky efforts to de-radicalize the strong man cults of the far right? I went back to read Dreambirds, Robnix and Streambirds. I could ask, what are the wild stories that get ostriches to Texas and Arizona? What are the historical and emergent rogues and picaros with the wildness to upstage and draw attention away from political superbugs, Trump and Netanyahu, and reduce their bulletproof violence? Where they lie. But give, and I just, finally, given our purest, leftist sentiments, would we have the stomach or the courage for it? Okay, thanks. Samia, you want to respond first? Let's see. Yeah. Thanks so much, Galev for the question. Yeah, I think maybe I can't really respond in a very general, yeah, it's not like a general recipe, I would say, but more very specific way of acting when it comes to specific projects. I'm just right now thinking of the book as a form of a repository, the exhibition as a form of exposure, but also communication with the very general public. And the testimonies is really undeniable evidence as human being speaking, and it can be shared and it is shared, it's online, it's available to whoever has access to internet. So I'm speaking like, like literally and not theoretically, really like as a way of acting within this kind of secrecy that the French created, the archives are still classified. So one of the questions that they had when they did not open the archives in 2020, when they were supposed to open them is to ask how do we oppose and disobey to this imposed amnesia and this imposed secrecy, which we know it's not secret because people are sick in the Sahara and in France and the territories are witnessing or are showing and demonstrating and illustrating all those toxic and radioactive landscapes and environment that the French left after they moved their nuclear weapon program to the Pacific Ocean in 1966. So for me, the question was how, as a scholar, knowing that archives are classified and knowing that historians work on archives, right? Their history is based on archives. So my question was how do we try to find other ways in other ways of knowing and other ways of exposing and other ways of collaborating and trying to use what other people did before and also what people experience to make this all not only accessible to others through this repository but also that can be reproduced. And this is exactly what the exhibition is doing is to start produce it somewhere and then design it in a way that it can be folded and sent all over the place and the aim or the objective or the hope and the wish is that the French and the Aegean government will act, meaning that they have to, I hope that they will be forced to decontaminate the sites and to repair, to take care of the health of the people in the Sahara and in France. So it's really literal, my response. And I agree, it's, I think exposure is not enough. I think reparation is needed, but to force that reparation, I think for me that's the question, how do we get to the accountability of nuclear regimes or even colonial states? How do they take their responsibility and how do we make them accountable for the deeds that, or the traces that they left? Yeah, no, I think that's a great set of issues that you flagged. And so, if there's slow violence, there's also slow resistance and relative to what the period I was writing about in the book, which was sort of mainly pre-digital. The very character, the technological character of our world has changed so much since then. Both in terms of the platforms available for representation and the constituencies you can reach through that, but also in terms of the distribution, many organizations around the world that have invested in distribution of technologies of surveillance and recording and data production and filming on the behalf of environmental defenders on the front lines and on the fence lines where people are most vulnerable. And so, I see that as one of the most promising developments. So, for instance, in the Amazon, indigenous peoples during the Bolsonaro period were widely using these technologies and producing data and using it in the international context, in legal context and so forth, in trying to document with a degree of texture and sufficient sophistication that was not possible prior. The other thing that I would say to your very resonant question is that I'm very interested in alliance building and the contingencies that allow alliances to happen to form and then often dissolve thereafter, but there are these possibilities and one of the things about what the anthropologist Anat Singh calls traveling allegories is we don't know what nodal images and stories are going to facilitate change and bring people together. If we think of Colin Kaepernick and taking the knee in the Premier League, which is the most watched sports league in the world today, each match still begins with players taking the knee as a protest against racism. So, the symbolic possibilities are very seldom realized at the moment of creation or invention. Similarly, Eric Garner saying 11 times I can't breathe and a somatic man being strangled. That became a rallying cry and it's not like people putting forethought into this. There is just a node and a possibility and sometimes it lands and sometimes it doesn't, but I'm very alive to the openness of the symbolic realm and the imaginative role that artists and what unfortunately called content providers sometimes can generate in terms of just putting something out there and not knowing who will congregate to it, not knowing how far geographically or in time that image or that story will continue to have a resonance. Yeah. Reynolds, please. Okay, well, I have to say I feel a little bit disarmed. I would have offered a more or less formal academic response to the chapter from Soil Violence that Rob circulated. I really would still like to do that and Samia's article from E-Flux, but I guess these guys haven't read or may not have read these. And so we're meant to have a conversation about sort of around these things. So to do that, I just wanted to see if we can kind of tighten up a little bit on some of the things we've been circling around already and begin by imagining that we're not on TV here and we're with Lola's lovely, these are really cool and the tables, but kind of the whole thing is over and we're like at a bar maybe or restaurant and we're not accountable in a sense to the theater. And we're just kind of talking as honestly as possible. And so the question is what is to be done? And I think we're already obviously circling around this, but I posed that question in its classic political form because in some sense the corollary to the beautiful forms of testimony, the evidence, the eloquence of your writing, the images that you've added now to our kind of witnessing and of course the horror that we've all been witnessing in Gaza that looms over all of this as we sit here helplessly and maybe a little parochial-y doing what we do. But the doing what we do sometimes also, it takes these other forms in which we maybe can maybe even discuss and I suspect we might even disagree as to what is to be done when the lights are off. So for example, it seems to me that the scandal here, I can't stop thinking about the angel of history today. And the kind of bearing witness, this is what of course we're all talking about. But the scandal is here, is here maybe not so much that we don't know that the archives have been closed, the state has withheld evidence or the corporations have withheld evidence as in Bopal, the scandals that we know. And yet. And so this is maybe I want to try and a little bit inject to the extent that it's possible at the bar and maybe there's something else in this class here. A sense of we don't have time in any of this with respect to any of these monstrosities to which we in our comfort continue to bear witness as others die. So maybe we can just parse it just one more level and distinguish to some extent. Samia made I think absolutely necessary reference to the ethical demands that are all of us in different ways or many of us at least are making. But I want to ask what it might mean to turn those into political demands. So for example, what in a political sense a nonviolent and slow violence might look like? Or and does it mean nationalizing the oil companies and shutting them down in that way? Is it, what else, what are the options that are really on the table kind of at the bar when the lights are off? So that's pretty much all I have to ask. What is to be done in that sort of unavoidably and necessarily urgent sense without trivializing the subtleties and complexities that we've been discussing. Shall I go first? No. No, go, go, go, Rob, Rob, go, go, Rob. I can't read the body language, so please, please. No, I think it's, yeah, I think it's a relevant question. And I respond to it maybe in a very controversial way and quoting, quoting Franç Farnand here, you know, for him decolonization is the substitution of a society with another society. We have not, we are not there. We did not substitute that society. Colonialism is still at stake. Colonialism is still operating all over the world and it's not only about the occupation and the oppression and the physical occupation of territories and societies, but it's also psychological one. It's an environmental one. It's an economic one, et cetera, et cetera. So in a way, as long as these forms of governance, of governance, so imperial and colonial governance, continue to operate in the ways that they operate, what can, what is to be done? For me, it's the substitution of those modes of operation. We did not, it didn't happen and I don't see it will happen in the very, very near future. I think quite the opposite. So we don't have time, yes, but who is the we here? I think this is the biggest division that I'm seeing it right now. It's like for many people, they do have time because they don't care about not having the time. I leave it to you, Rob. Yeah, okay, thanks. No, it's a very, it's a very important question and I think that, so if we think of neoliberalism as sort of a colonialism in another guys, one of the, I mean, two of the things that are markers of neoliberalism. One is concerted attacks on and dismantling of regulatory regimes and in addition to that, you have mega mergers of corporate mega mergers. So in the animals people chapter, you know, I talk about how the union carbide disappeared into dark chemical and so by a two companies merging into two large companies merging into a mega company, the dark chemical, which absorbed union carbide, absorbed the profits, but not the responsibilities. So that they said, well, union carbide no longer exists. So the reparations for the victims of the Bhopal disaster are not our problem. They are union carbide problem and union carbide has evaporated. We saw something similar in Ecuador with again, the merger of oil corporations and they would take the profits but not the responsibilities for the lasting effects. So that the disparity in size and power but also the disparity in social responsibility. So I think that even if we look at the crisis of democracy, one of the legacies of colonialism has been that so-called independence often arrived with the absence of a civic society that could apply a break to militarization and autocracy. So if we think of the Belgian Congo, for instance, when the Belgian left, there were 17 university graduates in the entire country, okay? And so we see that over and over again in so-called decolonized countries is the militarization of power and the assaults on already threadbare civic organizations of freedom of speech, rights of assembly. We see it even obviously in this country but even more acutely elsewhere. So I think that part of the political demand is for answerability, for regulatory transparency and to push back against something like Citizens United, the corporate personhood which is totally focused on the patent rights of the corporation and not on the health of the affected citizens referred to the fracking industry and that's become a classic site for this. And so in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, one of the things that we're seeing is the relationship between the horrendous immediate toll and what we can't even bear to look at yet, the long-term effects of ecocide, of the munitions being used and in Slow Violence I have a chapter where I talk about depleted uranium and the integration of that into so-called conventional warfare and that has a radioactive and a chemical threat that lasts, radioactive threat for millennium. So I think that part of the urgency is to address the immediate and also to spread awareness of the long-term. For instance, there has been some discussion in some Israeli political circles about flooding the tunnels with seawater, the salination of the tunnels, okay? So that might be presented as an immediate military strategy but it would render the land uninhabitable in perpetuity. So is there anything more precious in the Middle East than aquifers, okay? And so that is both a threat to the Gazans but a threat to people who may live there 500,000 years from now. So I think it's hard enough looking at the immediate brutality but there is also a moral and environmental imperative, I think to talk about the tactics of war, the particular munitions and toxic substances used in war, which increasingly, I think what we would be pushing back against is creeping militarization. And I think above all, if we look at what's going on in Gaza and Israel, the people who are plauding are the military, the people who are plauding are the people who are plauding are the people who are plauding are the people who are plauding the military industry, basically the international military industry so that countries like Germany, Denmark, et cetera say well, we have to take a lot of our social care budget we have to cut that and beef up the military, okay? So that's above all what I'm opposed to is the militarization of everything and recognizing that there are so many incentives for people to take from already threadbare social networks of support and care and transfer that to a very narrow idea of security narrow both in terms of strategy and narrow in terms of time. Thank you. Maybe this is a good moment to open it up to the audience. Are there any questions? I don't see any questions. Maybe I can pose a question. I'll start with something from the planetary cohort who have submitted several questions in advance. Am I missing someone? No, right? No. Basically several questions that were submitted in advance had to do with the sort of speciality of your work I think given the context of a school like this as well. So I'm just repeating a question by Juan Jose Sanchez Rivas from Madrid who is wondering if it is possible to fight against the inequality created by this slow violence with specific spatial strategies. So spatial strategies as a form of resistance I would say. And the other question is about, it's from Emily Emeline from Providence, Rhode Island who is asking about proximity. How is proximity defined by military, corporate or insurance interests and knowing the leakiness of sites of slow violence basically? Are there different ways to think about proximity? Those are two sort of spatial questions that I wanted to point out. Okay. Yeah. So I think the spatial question, what are the different forms of distance? So there's physical geographical distances, temporal distance and often they can both be used to outsource responsibility and that's so much easier to camouflage in an era of where the power and mobility of mega corporations is so much greater than the power and the mobility of individuals. So one of the things that I've seen as a detective and this is partly coming out of my new work on environmental martyrs in the tropical forests that circle the midriff of the earth, is the organizations one would be not one more which is attempted to reduce the number of environmental defenders, something like 900 a year who are assassinated each year, primarily in these tropical forests, bringing people together from different social movements that have roughly analogous experiences. So if you're a forest defender in the tropics and you're in Indonesia or Cambodia or Colombia or Brazil or Nigeria, you're going to have different political and legal landscapes that you're operating in but many of the factors and the challenges you're facing and the strategies and technologies that you can use to defend yourself are roughly analogous or partly analogous. And so I've been quite encouraged by some of those organizations that have used their resources not to just bring in experts but to have people in Brazil talking to people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Guinea-Bissau or Indonesia. And one of the striking things about this is that I was talking to a friend who'd organized one of these conferences and she said that 30% of their budget was for translators because there was no central language. It wasn't like English or Spanish or Portuguese. You're translating amongst so many different languages. Now maybe with AI these costs would come down but she said what was so astonishing was for an international conference the translation costs were far higher than the airfares. And so the fact is that the most vulnerable communities environmentally are very often from small linguistic groups and so getting people together to share strategies to bring together pro bono lawyers bring together journalists and scholars with these people who have shared experiences across these front lines I think is a very positive way of using proximity that is hard to come by for them but also to create conversations that are hard to have if they are typically refracted through an academic occasion. Samia, would you like to respond to these questions? The question of proximity and spatial. Yeah, I think the question of proximity maybe I can start with the design. I think it's what architects and people who studied architecture and urban studies but specifically architecture and planning I think we have this capacity to map. I know it's obvious but it's extremely important to try to map what cannot be mapped. Radioactivity is completely and also chemical toxicity it's not visible to the human eye but we need to find ways to represent it and to make it to map it. I think this is an extremely important way to keep or to try to maintain that media attention. I think the media attention here is not only with newspaper but it's with any kind of media. So we need to create those maps or we need to create those representations in order to speak about them and in order to name them because they are not visible to the human eye. I think this is for me very important and it cannot be done only in one territory it has to be done in a relational way because these kinds of radioactivity or these kinds of toxicity circulates around the world. There are no borders. So the question is how do we represent it and how do we map it so that we can see it name it and talk about it not only in the region but also how it circulates. That's maybe a response on design and special practices and what's the role that we should have. I said we are all responsible we will not forget. So we have agents very important that we use it. The question of proximity in the case of the Algerian Sahara radioactivity is really travelling or occupying, inhabiting if not colonizing the bodies of people and it is transgenerational. So it's extremely near close to the body if not it's in the body of the Saharan and also people are also French veterans and how do we read, how do we speak, how do we even map that proximity. I think this is another way or another impossibility of representation. It's occupying their bodies, their human bodies and they are transmitting those diseases and those radioactivity that we don't know when it radiates as well because some of these particles are still circulating in the Sahara so people can inhale it they can anytime be contaminated and that kind of proximity for me it's always difficult to represent and we have to think about how to be represented. There is a question here. Thank you for the conversation. My name is Anishka. While I recognize the hardness of asking for a solution I'm curious about repositioning that question that has been asked to think about why it is that we are doing the work that we are doing here whether that relates to research but also the practice of teaching and I guess I'm sort of searching for some form of optimism related to where the way and the modes that we are being taught to think goes outside of sort of a room like this or whether it's sort of a satisfaction with the recognition that it will remain on some form of margin somewhere and sort of an attempt to sort of situate this type of work in the long history but also sort of a long future of what comes next and how this matters, I guess. Why are we doing what we are doing basically? Sure. The short answer. For me, sometimes it's less a question of hope than of strategy towards change that we need to marshal hope and we all need hope as a kind of a fuel for our existence but at the same time I think particularly in the US there is in films, books and that there's sometimes an obligatory arc towards hope and sometimes that can be genuine and germane and integral and sometimes it can be kind of tagged on as the editor said we need a more hopeful ending kind of thing and sometimes I feel more hopeful when the ending is more ambiguous and I don't feel put upon by that but I think that what I was describing earlier where those of us who have resources use those resources to try to create the conditions for conversations that are not happening or are very difficult to generate I think that to me is a very essential dimension to holding on to the prospect of change and so also I think it's so important to whether we're talking about climate we're talking about the Middle East to remember that change has happened in very profound and unexpected ways historically and like every social movement that has made an impact whether we're talking about suffragettes anti-apartheid movement, civil rights movement the movement for marriage equality AIDS activism in the late 80s and 90s every one of those movements were a mix of pessimism and optimism and certainly when I was growing up in South Africa apartheid seemed written in stone like people would say well history's not on the side but if you look around you it was so difficult to see the mechanisms for change and then certain things shifted we had the collapse of the Soviet Union in 89 Mandela freed from prison the following year and the divestment movement in the US contributed trade union movement all these different forces that came together and suddenly there was a tectonic shift in the political landscape similarly having moved to the US in the 80s with the AIDS crisis there was a time when people were profoundly pessimistic about the prospect of not only antiretrovirals which were not even a figment of people's imagination at that point but also of the vilification of queerness it seemed like again like written in stone and so we do see shifts that are often quite sudden and quite significant and as we've seen with abortion they are reversible and I see this particularly with environmental activism is that if there's a lucrative product in the ground you can have a victory 30 years later somebody else is trying to get that out and you have to redo the struggle it's not victory or defeat and every victory has elements of defeat within it and I think every defeat also has the seeds of new initiatives and new possibilities Canada, do you want to respond to something? I would respond briefly just to underscore some things that have been said sometimes one thinks of a cultural narrative or a popular cultural narrative as a novel or a film or you showed works of art visual art or one refers to sort of activist movements but I'm wondering if you pose a question which says that exposure is inextricably linked to reparations then aren't some emerging narratives design stories design narratives some of what we do when we work outside of kind of the cul-de-sac of the discipline cul-de-sac of the profession I'll say what are design narratives how is that a different emergent narrative than some of those which we're familiar or that are most popular and how does it become a popular narrative? Samia Yes, thank you Yeah, maybe to respond to this question like why are we doing the work or why are we doing what we are doing for me maybe it's banal but I think because we are human beings living on this earth and we need each of us need to do something so we need to do this kind of work but I would also like to invite you the person who asked the question can we ask the question differently can we say can we maybe say that how can we see the work that we are doing as a possible contribution to the many actions and many practices that are being done on this planet because I think it's not about a solution there is no universal solution there are many scales of contributing and this is maybe the question of proximity or distance the scales of contributing to a change or to strategy to use Rob's term strategies I would even say of existing we cannot not do anything I think we are hopeful we are very optimistic because we are doing the work that we are doing so how do we think of the different scales that one with which one could contribute and here I'm not speaking only about the scale the special scale but also the temporal scale and the institutional scale I think institution in this kind of optimistic or productive contribution I think is really relevant I think this is a great point to stop thank you everyone thank you and Reinhard I wish I was there with you in the bar to speak about the art come on over