A series of walks tracing ways petroleum and finance stabilize the settler colonial present by shaping understandings of community and participation. We also explore alternatives from below by organizing experimental people’s field trips that highlight indigenous assertions of sovereignty and relationship, resistant practices and illegalized modes of knowing. Walks are accompanied by a map/text publication or takeaway. Materials framing the interrogation, as well as documents, residue and interpretations of the walks that took place in 2016 and 2017 were collected in an exhibition and archived in a handmade book called “An Atlas of the Petrocapital” designed in collaboration with Fata Morgana Press, part of the South Chicago Library reference Collection. This practice is ongoing.
Bubbles and Clouds – a dérive-ative through finance. On this field trip we strive for an analytic and sensorial interpretation of megadevelopment and fianancial markets. We take the pulse of the financial rituals, regulatory rejigging, technospatial competition and dream-making that produce the current cycle of real estate speculation and overbuilding booms. We hands-on demo the technologies of racial finance and collectively map the social logic of the derivative. Theorizing and trespassing required. (3-5 hours).
Full essay/text of the brochure can be read here
Where is after petroleum and whose time it is there?
Diving into energy infrastructure using listening as a collective and social making, this is a performance pedagogy workshop that strives for a direct engagement with the settler colonial future as it is being produced today. It repurposes methods from deep listening and acoustic ecology towards a confrontation with settlerness as it emerges through affective orientations and ways of stabilizing the perceptual field. This trip connects two moments along the rail/petroleum infrastructure. Requires climbing, trespassing and crossing rough terrain. (3-4 hours or all day)
The Black Snake Tour of Aurora (Parts 1, 2 and 3)
Tripping through the racialized geographies and contested indigenous landscapes, petroleum supply chains, financial infrastructures and spaces of resistance in the globalized suburb of Aurora, IL. This trip is designed collaboratively among a working group of residents, researchers, artists and troublemakers. By engaging with different sites and knowledge-systems, we challenge settler colonial histories and place-making. Activities include playing along an Enbridge pipeline, tracing sites of indigenous resurgence, an unauthorized tour of the infrastructure of global financial markers, and storytelling about local rail and migration history. We end by sharing a meal at an indigenous land project. English/Spanish, all ages and abilities welcome. (8 hours, food provided)
To download full resolution map/essay, please click here .
Please also see a second publication, a collaborative zine reflecting on the field trip, here
Invisible Landscapes, Indigenous Landscapes – a native plant and petroleum pipeline walk for children and adults
A walkabout the petropolitics of prairie restoration. We unpack practices of planting and transplanting, we walk with petroleum. With indigenous ecology educators Janie Pochel (Cree/Lakota) and Fawn Pochel (Cree/Lakota) and members of the Chi-Nations Youth Council. All ages and ability levels. Contact for language access support. (4 hours)
Extraction and resistance in the Calumet
“Community” is often invoked by powerful agencies and institutions. From corporate programs, to “public-private” forms of governance, from educational and cultural institutions to nonprofit agencies, from activist art to “indigenous solidarity” and decolonizing this-and-that, a lot of money is pumped into initiatives that supposedly address social and political problems; instead, these investments facilitate further dispossession of the very peoples and ecosystems they are supposedly serving. From below and to the left, this looks a lot like resource extraction. We will move along pathways of environmental justice history in the Calumet and share specific experiences of being pimped out by nonprofiteers, de-escalated by academics, abused by the peace-police and contained by movement managers. This gathering will be a moving celebration of resistance to extractive economies of different kinds, and a resource-sharing on surviving the struggle despite the bullshit of the establishment “left”. Informal English/Spanish interpretation support, all ages and abilities. (8 hours)
Mapping Petroleum Lives – mind-mapping workshop. We use popular education methods from prison abolition organizing to collectively map our daily lives as a system of petroleum relations. No experience necessary, it’s a mind-mapping day.