[-empyre-] AMAZON IS BURNING

[Dan Phiffer]

Hello -empyre-,

I’ve been subscribed to the list for a while but have never written in before. In this time of slow emergency, it feels right to discuss the urgent present at the slower pace of a mailings list. Compared to other popular social media it's liberating to take the time to process and write without an onslaught of status updates, likes and retweets. I’ve been reading the thread with interest, and I’m especially grateful for the context provided by Sergio and fabi and Ana for what’s happening in the Amazon.

Like Dawn, I've been getting involved in climate resistance with Extinction Rebellion and I can relate to the sentiments in her email. It does feel performative, as the XR strategy is entirely dependent on mass media coverage of our actions in order to mobilize a critical mass of public support. Yes, our ranks are overwhelmingly privileged, which is uncomfortable. Our tactics depend on a logic of relatively low stakes encounters with police, which are not low stakes for all (especially those most impacted by environmental injustice).

But there are a couple XR dynamics that might be easily overlooked, that have become clearer to me as I’ve worked to organize a new group in the NY Capital Region [1]. 

It feels important to start from where you are, to build on existing local affinity groups, to take time for learning the skills required for effective political resistance. A surprising side effect from getting arrested with XR-NYC in April [2] is that I've been added to a big Signal group chat, where several members have been posting about non-XR actions and flagging a variety of other protests for us to join in solidarity.

There are also a wide variety of roles that don’t involve resisting arrest. Things like jail support, social media, video editing, phone banking. There is a whole lot of less-visible labor that goes into planning and executing actions. For those of us who do have excess social privilege, who have salaried jobs and can afford to miss a day of work, getting arrested is only marginally more challenging than being a visible "body in the street” for a march.

I don't know if the efforts of XR might primarily serve to mitigate our collective sense of guilt and complicity. I don’t know if our four demands [3] are the right fit for the great reckoning that has begun, and that will intensify over our lifetimes. But what does feel very clear to me is this is a time for learning new skills and creating necessary private supports for public mobilization [4] even if this all might be a bit late.

I’m sure many on this list are active in environmental organizing in a variety of modes, and I am embracing a sense of radical openness learning from what XR's victories and mistakes, as well from those who have been doing this longer with other groups. Yesterday was another year since Occupy Wall Street began, and I am so grateful for what I learned then, how many connections and experiences still feel vital today.

<3
Dan

[1]: https://xrcr.life/
[2]: https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/17/extinction_rebellion_shuts_down_street_near
[3]: https://extinctionrebellion.us/demands
[4]: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/bodies/Judith%20Butler:%20Bodies%20in%20Alliance%20and%20the%20Politics%20of%20the%20Street%20%7C%20eipcp.net.pdf


> On Sep 18, 2019, at 1:31 AM, Dawn Weleski <dawnweleski at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Great lead in Oliver, as I just got my thoughts together / images posted - - 
> 
> Firstly I send, in the tradition of the Haudenosaunee Thanks Giving Address, greetings of friendship and respect from unceded Oneida land (Hamilton, NY) one of six sovereign nations in the Haudenosaunee (AKA Iroquois) Confederacy. I’ll attempt to intersperse this text with links to images and videos to begin to engage the more sensorial, as we speak of a co-opted technology that perhaps one day we will share together with all of our senses – food.  
> 
> I thank Fabi and Sergio for their latest comments, as for shifts to happen in our current state of entropy, it must come from those most marginalized and disenfranchised. Food grown, harvested and processed when just, cooperative and intrapersonal labor is closest to the biological and psychological technologies of the farm / garden / meal / hospitality, is the most resource-full. To this end, I will endeavor to offer the words of those (that I have been in contact with and upon whose land I am currently a guest) that perhaps bear the deepest understandings of our illness and perhaps most acutely nourish and innovate our medicine.
> 
> Through now seven years of deep research with corn throughout this continent and southern neighboring land, with Indigenous, metis, and non-Indigenous communities, as well as work around food and conflict since 2010 around the world, I begin by offering the words from the Seneca Thanksgiving Address by Chief Corbett Sundown, Tonawanda Seneca, 1959: …
> 
>  “THE PLANTS And now this [sic] what the Creator did. He decided, ‘There will be plants growing on the earth. Indeed, all of them will have names, as many plants as will be growing on the earth. At a certain time they will emerge from the earth and mature of their own accord. They will be available in abundance as medicines to the people moving about on the earth.’ That is what he intended. And it is true: we have been using them up the present time, the medicines which the Creator made. He decided that it would be thus: that people would be obtaining them from the earth, where the medicines would be distributed. And this [sic] what the Creator did: He decided, ‘Illness will overtake the people moving about on the earth, and these will always be there for their assistance.’ And he left on the earth all the different medicines to assist us in the future.”
> 
> Corn is integral to all aspects of the Haudenosaunee way of life: the ceremonial cycle, oral traditions / stories, cultural community base, and as a means towards maintaining economic sovereignty. Conflict Kitchen not only afforded myself and the staff an opportunity to educate ourselves on corn as a technology for the Haudenosaunee, but, through many hours in the restaurant and kitchen tables around the world, offered us time to physically, mentally and emotionally process this technology with those operating the Iroquois White Corn Project at Ganondagan (western New York State), among other individuals and organizations. 
> 
> As members of the Seneca Nation, they are able to extend the sovereignty of their nation and are active agents in Haudenosaunee cultural maintenance and innovation by growing and processing this heirloom seed, as well as protecting through visibility: “People don’t think of Native Americans as actual, real people. We’re like a cartoon, a romantic idea of a picture. It’s dehumanizing. … There was a sign in [my son’s school] garden that said, ‘Native Americans’ used to grow corn, squash and beans together.’ No, we grow it NOW – present tense. Why the past tense? It fits into this narrative of ‘a vanishing people’ who exist only in the past, who are extinct; an inevitability of colonization, part of the natural decline of Native people. These ideas cover up as excuse the facts of genocide and displacement. They erase the realities and identities of native people living in contemporary society. They cater to the white imagination, excuse guilt and allow for free appropriation, which is consumed and profited off of, without consequence” (Anonymous, Conflict Kitchen Haudenosaunee food wrapper interviewee, 2016)
> 
> More here from Rowen White (Mohawk Nation; Seed Keeper of the Akwesasne community), Elizabeth Hoover (Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent), and Lauren Jimerson (Seneca Nation, Heron Clan; artist and former project director at the Iroquois White Corn Project).
> 
> Whether in New York State, Brazil, DR Congo, or western China, we can always count on these technologies and those who sustain them, to be reframed as oppositional weapons by those in power. While cooking in Conflict Kitchen’s kitchen with Culinary Director Robert Sayre whose father is the co-founder and scientist at Pebble Labs and Trait Biosciences in Los Alamos, our conversations would inevitably converge between “science for whom” with Richard’s newest cassava research in West Africa, the ongoing conflict in Syria on the morning radio, yet another customer at the window who wanted our menu to be solely vegan, clogged grease traps and overstacked dishes, continued gentrification in one of Pittsburgh predominant Black neighborhoods with a just opened white-owned ‘hip-hop and fried chicken joint’ down the street from a recently forced out Black-owned music venue, international reporters who wanted only the most superficial story of artists challenging Trump, our newly formed staff union (I was management), or the death threat that we received during our Palestinian iteration.
> 
> Last week, after a bit of whiskey (corn ala Ireland) at a local bar, a discussion with a fellow patron about their t-shirt message, witnessing the harvest moon among the corn fields here grown by folks from all walks of life, except Indigenous, I headed four hours south to New York City past many, many American flags to a very panicked (and mostly white) group of individuals this past weekend, screenprinting shirts for Extinction Rebellion’s next action and “Cultivating Active Hope: Living with Joy Amidst the Climate Crisis” processing workshop. These small bits continue to feel performative, knowing the wrongdoing my ancestors committed and that I, to the best of my ability unknowingly, will continue to commit far and near.
> 
> In my hometown of Natrona Heights, PA, about 30 minutes northeast of Pittsburgh, PA, my parents and I were spared the great many floods my grandparents and great-grandparents experienced after arriving from Poland and working in the local salt mines, steel mills, and glass factories: “In the 1950s, Pittsburgh was repeatedly flooded by the Allegheny River. The United States government, the city and the state administrations got together and said, ‘If we build a dam upriver, we wouldn’t have flooding in Pittsburgh.’ The Corps of Engineers promised the Seneca Nation that, when they built the dam, the would move the people and give them homes and everything they needed. We believed them. Instead, they gave the displaced Native people empty trailers to live in with no electricity, relocated them to land where they couldn’t hunt as freely and broke their promise to move the Native graves. The effects are still being felt. As recently as 20 years ago, there were still bodies washing up in the Allegheny Reservoir. It caused a 30-year depression within the Nation. Not being able to live off the land, not understanding that you have to make money to pay for that electric bill or food at the grocery store in town instead of hunting: it was a big transition for many of the families there. … That land was Native people’s home. It was a third of the Seneca Nation’s territory. It was the richest, most arable farmland near the water. And now it’s completely destroyed” (Anonymous, Conflict Kitchen Haudenosaunee food wrapper interviewee, 2016).
> 
> Indeed, techne - a tool - whether art, food or knowledge, can and should be wielded as a weapon of defense and resistance, in turn:
> 
> SOUP
> 
> From Entering Onondaga
> Joesph Bruchac (AKA Planting Moon), 1977
> 
> One time Coyote
> drank soup from
> Turtle’s pot
> 
> Turtle wasn’t home
>  
> Coyote stepped
> behind a pine
> to take a leak
> trickle became a river
> 
> Help me, I can’t stop
> 
> river turned into flood
> covered the land
> swept Coyote’s people away
> 
> Don’t mess around
> with other people’s things
> 
> ~~~~~
> 
> “I am challenging the occupation by living only off the fruits of my land. In this way, the land itself is empowering me to resist” (Khalid Daraghmeh, Conflict Kitchen label on olive oil products from the Daraghmeh Family Farm, 2014).
> 
> ~~~~~
> 
> And these technologies we hone and ready now, as always.
> 
> With deepest gratitude,
> 
> dawn
> 
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 12:05 AM Oliver Kellhammer <okellhammer at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Was wondering about the notion of kleptocracies in all of this?
> Human Rights Watch has published an interesting piece about the involvement of crime syndicates in the Amazon's deforestation
> https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/17/rainforest-mafias/how-violence-and-impunity-fuel-deforestation-brazils-amazon
> In the United States, we have our own horrorshow version of being ruled by a criminal elite, but this seems to have become a worldwide trend in tandem with the collapse of climate stability. It has been hard for progressives to organize against as it is a kind of anti-ideology -  no real program other than the celebration of brute force and the cult of the strong man. Yet this proves undeniably attractive to a section of the proletariat even though it acts in opposition to their interests.
> Is this the logical end game of neoliberalism - a battle of in Hobbes' words 'all against all'  where everyone eventually loses? How can we as cultural workers counteract this nihilism? Marx's oft-quoted exhortation that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it" rings ever more loudly in my ears. But artists too spend a lot of our time interpreting.
> 
> Loving the conversation so far!
> 
> O.
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 8:32 AM Sergio Basbaum <sbasbaum at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> thank you Fabi, this is also a very important part of the nightmare. The repression and despise for all minority and diversity discourses is a very important side of the Bolsonaro's agenda. But still, its grounded on an imaginary of a society not related to reality, but something more alike the ideology of American Western films, something like that. "Me, my wife, my land, my riffle" -- remember they have that anachronistic idolatry for weapons... and that the weapons industry and they congressmen are an important supporter of this government. Also, this obviously means they want to guarantee to the big farmers the right to kill those who are fighting for land, and also indians and the forest.
> 
> As for the economic importance of Organic food, remember last year -- still Temer's government -- congressman have tried to approve a law forbidding supermarkets of selling organic products, claiming that this kind of food should be sold in specialized markets. It looks like they're worried about losing part of the market for healthy foods. 
> 
> These are only footnotes to the many important topics you've raised and the narrative you presented.
> 
> best
> s 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 2:57 AM fabi borges <catadores at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello everyone!
> I want to comment on these two points brought by Oliver and Brian Holmes, because there are two important things here (all the rest is important as well, but it would be too much things to think right now):
> In Hobbes' notion of the 'The Leviathan' the state via some kind of sovereign power mitigates in 'the war of all against all.'
> It seems now what we are seeing is the emergence of 'anti-states' in which the only governing principle is the imposition of raw power, not based on any rational, even maliciously rational, program.
> America under Trump has felt like this. It is the administration's pervasive irrationalism that has made it so hard for the left to respond rationally. The more contradictions and falsehoods the anti-state promulgates, the more its asserts its raw power.
> I was wondering if this is what is happening under the Bolsonaro. Are irrationality and brutality its main selling points to a nihilistic electorate?
> - - – - - – - - -
> The consequences of the fires in the Amazon know no borders, and neither do the forces that ignited them. If the developed nations want a greater say in the stewardship of the rainforest, they might need to provide more than the modest $20 million offered by the G-7 last month. They might need to pay for it in higher prices for agricultural imports. Most important, they might have to readjust their own consumption habits.
> Bolsonaro, as he has on so many other occasions, is also missing the point — and an opportunity. If he really wants to revitalize Brazil’s economy, he could take advantage of the world’s renewed interest in the Amazon and ask developed countries just how much they’re willing to pay to help preserve it. Allowing further deforestation may be a tempting short-term economic lifeline, but this policy puts at risk the future of his country and of its neighbors around the globe.
> 
> 
> From the Bolsonaro perspective (and all that this implies in political / economic / social terms) Europe has destroyed its forests and now (colonially) wants to interfere with the Brazilian forest as its last resort, making it the “lung of the world”. Transform the Amazon into an untouchable reserve for the good of humanity, and thereby take away the autonomy of the Brazilian state to use its land for its own enrichment. Damn humanity, Brazil needs to boost its economy and agriculture is its best talent. Indigenous “vagabonds” stand on top of productive land and gold mines without exploiting it, complaining about having more money and spending for the state rather than producing, so “let's change that” as he always says. Indigenous have to modernize, and this implies becoming farmers, entering into export projects, "feeding humanity", and stopping this litany of human rights, this victimistic whim of wanting to maintain evidently outdated life forms.
> In this perspective really the $ 20 million offered by the G-7 or the $ 80 million by Angela Merkel from Germany is a big joke, as he said: "I want to send a message to dear Angela Merkel, who suspended $ 80 million to the Amazon. Take that money and reforest Germany, okay? It needs a lot more than here."
> This “hardworking” perspective is what he preserves, the rest is mimimi, (and here we all come in): lazy indigenous people, vagabond artists, intellectuals sucking on state ceilings flaunting eruditism, teachers bon vivant doing conspiracy at state expense, fat, flabby quilombolas to let it all hang out, gay movement that only thinks about sex and depravity instead of working, aggressive, unproductive feminists, landless, homeless, roofless... His point of view blends Italian immigration into Brazil (farmers, planters, workers) with American Protestantism, which he greatly admires, transformed into prosperity theology + the winner project. The alliance with the United States has to do with this desire to ally itself with a prosperous, rich, powerful country with which Brazil has always identified, much more than with South America. In their minds, Brazil will finally enter in its devotional path which is to feed humanity with food, metals, etc and get rich !!!
> It is also a revenge against the identity movements that for 10 years have empowered themselves to the point of exactly inhibiting the role of male, macho, provider, productive, to turn everything into a bunch of weak, full of rights and vagabonds. The image he wants to rescue is that of the worker, the rich man, the power, becoming a strong, potent, big, hard cock country on which much of humanity depends for food and feedstock.
> I see nothing irrational here, quite the contrary, although I see nihilism towards the “end of the world” and a lack of confidence in the theories of “anthropocene, humans as geological forces that are destroying the planet, etc.”, I see a kind of historical revenge, (we don’t understand really, but in the middle of it has the idea of no submission, and anti-colonialism – in a very strong and complex form - and anti- communism - evidently).
> Some dams will give way, some forests will burn, some people will die, but that's part of the growing process, stop crying!!
> Destroying institutions is part of the project because institutions hinder the progress, but not the corporations which in turn are the only way to create political and economic strength!
> "The lefts" has answers to this, but they are not yet financially effective in countering the status brought by Bolsonaro and his gang. The MST for example (Landless Workers Movement) during the Lula era has greatly strengthened its awareness of the Earth/land, becoming a reference in Brazil and even in the world regarding agroforestry, community agriculture, permaculture, organic farming, but it still does not represent the force of the monoculture and livestock.
> The conflict of perspectives is on the table, the madness and irrationality are unfortunately no consolation. The developmentalist project is still in full swing and the consciousness of the earth, interspecies relations, ayahuasca rituals, organic gardens, the diversity of peoples and their modes of existence are still largely ghetto conversations that do not earn enough in the world of market or stock market. Despite the incomparable openness of the left in Brazil in recent years to social movements, human rights, ecology, the heavy developmentalist project was there, on a large, huge scale, with the opening of hydroelectric platform amid indigenous lands (xingu, amazonas), petroleum and gas pipelines, construction, etc, etc.
> I conclude this part by saying that if Europe now want to take an interesting political stance on the importation of soybeans, meat, food from Brazil, it should invest a large part of its money buying from the Landless workers Movements, those trained in what is most accurate in terms of agroecology (not all of them, but many). $100 milhons is still little, but already gives a boost. And Keep the value dispute.
> Examples:
> http://www.mst.org.br/2015/06/16/sem-terra-reescrevem-historia-do-cacau-no-sul-da-bahia.html
> https://globaljusticeecology.org/brazil-mst-land-activists-to-win-prestigious-agroecology-award/
> 
> keep on
> fabi. 
> 
> On Tue, 17 Sep 2019 at 07:01, Sergio Basbaum <sbasbaum at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Oliver,
> 
> Dark times. The way that has lead to that tragedy is very controversial, since it involves populist goverments in all Latin America, with certain social impact but other aspects not so healthy, to say the least, and out the scope of the debate. Also, an impeachment process in Brazil. But I don't think it is too radical to say that the controversy about what was right or wrong in these governments is paralizing mass resistance in Brazil. There's no party or leadership or set of discourses able to capture mass participation in the process of resistance. On the other hand, Bolsonaro's government is violently destroying all social structures in which resistence usually develops: culture, arts, education, universities and anything which may resemble any kind of free thinking. Public universities, post graduate programs, research scholarships are being explicitly attacked. 
> 
> You mention psychonalysis. I will make use this space precious freedom to advance some insights of mine in the current state of things. However, the state of things demands urgent reaction we don't see, and the conditions here resemble the kind of apathy mentioned by Geert Lovink in a recent email, but, still, I think here things are more severe. 
> 
> I mean that, as I see it, Brazil as an enormous country, full of sub-cultures and different dialects and peoples, has always been unified by fictional narratives. The pre-republic stage, when Brazil was a kingdom governed by an emperor, created a narrative of its grandeur, and the grandeur of colonizers, which is almost fictional, with heroes that were not, real monsters in fact. In the XXth century, during the populist Vargas dictatorship, from 1937-1945, another fake identity, with new fake heroes like Tiradentes -- who's been hanged and quartered by the Portuguese, in the XVIIIth century --, whose was created for public opinion resembling Jesus in the cross, and also creating the known image of Brazil as a country free of racial conflicts -- also fake,
> 
> Later, the military dictatorship (1964-85) also created its official ufanist version of the country, full of lies, and kept intelectuals and artists silent through all kind of repressive means. When the dictatorship was over, once again we haven't been able to face the truth of the horrible crimes committed by the military governments: a general amnesty has guaranteed many torturers and murderers to remain free, sometimes celebrated as heroes in an imaginary war against communism. Ironically, president Jair Bolsonaro, a radical right-wing captain who had expelled from the army because he was -- believe me -- planning to set off a bomb at the barracks to demand better pay -- was also benefited with amnesty, and was free to become a congressman, and later, surfing in this strange conservative wave we're experiencing in the globe (also with the help of Cambridge Analytica election strategies), suddenly became the representative of all the worse forces in the country, in a time when progressive forces are under a huge crisis.
> 
> This is how I see things. 
> 
> In terms of resistance strategies, we're trying to react this radical-right tsunami.I'm sure the strategies will emerge. As for Amazon, I think it is very importat now to support 
> Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapó tribe as a candidate for the 2020 Peace Nobel Prize, both because of his lifetime fight for the fores as for his lifetime fight for native peoples in Brazil.
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/09/14/world/europe/14reuters-brazil-environment-raoni.html?fbclid=IwAR1H-5wdgTTiGN8HTGXa_HBHs_R_qA56--6MWIFFpV3PoWEOFKIv_oI47_Y 
> 
> That's not much, but that's something.
> 
> Best from Brazil
> 
> s 
>        
> 
> On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 12:52 AM Oliver Kellhammer <okellhammer at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Sergio:
> 
> Firstly, my heart goes out to you and everyone (human and nonhuman) suffering from this cataclysm.
> I am interested too in your description of 'people not being able to believe it is true.' I wonder how much shock and disavowal play into the global stasis around the climate emergency and the extinction crisis. Real disasters are unfolding globally in the biosphere, but also in the psychoanalytical space. Yes, there are repressive, ecocidal and genocidal regimes but they are aided and abetted by a significant portion of the population. The hypnotic powers of populists seem almost a type of dark magic. Do you and Fabi and any of the others on the ground there in Brazil have any thoughts on that? What is happening here in America seems so analogous but I am sure there are major differences too?
> 
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 5:15 PM Sergio Basbaum <sbasbaum at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> From Brazil, I reinforce that the situation is really very very bad and it may come up to a point in which there's no return. The government in Brazil is committing every conceivable crime in terms of violations of native people territories and environmental rules. It's been so explicit up to the point of people not being able to believe this is true.
> 
> Every support and every help spreading this state of things may help us stop this nightmare.
> 
> best
> s
> 
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 10:32 AM margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I write from Oneida territory in what is currently central New York within the so-called United States. The Oneida are one of the 5 nations that comprise the Haudenosaunee confederacy, and this land from which I write has never been ceded. The apocalypse began here 500 years ago.
> 
> ...
> 
> Amazon is burning. forest, cows, soybeans, machines, trades, global food/trade politics
> 
> This week's discussants hope to think together about disasters, and disaster capitalism/ vs. possibilities in ruins: how, as Oliver Kellhammer puts it, ruins are the porous interface between imagining possible futures on one hand and disaster capitalism on the other. Here we must think hard about the relationships between Amazon fires, opportunities for soybean production as food and feed, and cattle ranching (noting the "soy-cattle pasture-deforestation dynamic"). We must think hard about what emerges intentionally and unintentionally from the disturbance. Soybeans (and we might think of the crop here as cheap energy, nitrogen fixer, endocrine disruptor, as allergen generator), and cows (as frontier, as cheap energy, cheap labor, as domesticating 'wilderness')  are intentionally introduced of course, and they are implicated in the larger dynamics of global capital, and the processes of what Jason Moore calls "making cheap." Specifically they are implicated in the trade poitics of the moment: Trump's trade war with China. Soybeans were the biggest export from the US to China; new tariffs position Brazil to take over the drop in US shipments.
> 
> ...What other species emerge and travel from the fires? What viruses hop, what ghosts.
> 
> ...This week, let's also ask, how can we do time and dreams in relation to food/ trade/ politics. To return, always to Benjamin's 9th Thesis. How do we stop the storm of progress and tend to the catastrophe? What are the practices that change time? Fabi Borges will share with us (among other amazing interstellar work she is doing) indigenous wisdom she has learned from the Amazon, asking, how do we stop dreaming the same dream? How do we imagine more worlds than one?
> 
> ...What are the ways that we know? Using interstellar satellite imagery to know about fires, we use technology that itself emerges from coloniality and ways of knowing from above, as if there can be a whole, a point of neutrality not implicated in totalizing regimes of control. How are we caught up and inadvertently worlding with this technology -- can this entanglement make more than one world? More than one dream?
> 
> ...I'd love to ask the discussants and invite the readership to imagine together what a revolt of  unpaid machines and unpaid natures could look like. What plants can disrupt monocrop cultivation of soybeans? What kin do soybeans thrive with? What invasive species will act as a scab on the scorched earth? What technologies can be hijacked for different ends than global capital and control.
> 
> ...Always, we must recognize who and what worlds are lost. The indigenous (Munduruku, Huni Kuin, Xingu to name 3 of over 300 in Brazil) and their kin. The marmosets, the spider monkeys, the tamarin, the jaguars, the sloths, frogs, lizards, parakeets, mahogany, ironwood, brazil nuts, cocoa, passiflora vines, orchids, bromeliads....
> 
> A few thoughts to begin.
> 
> Amazon is burning. forest, cows, soybeans, machines, trades, global food/trade politics
> 
> (Note: originally the title She Lea gave me was: "amazon is burning. on forest, machines, interspecies, interstellar, plantationocene, cows, soybeans and global food/trade politics," and after agonizing over it, now I realize I am somewhat attached to it. Consider the additional terms stars in a constellation that are usually hard to see)
> 
> ...
> 
> I am honored to have a set of artists and thinkers with me this week to work on remembering together -- re-member-ing as reassembling a body, reassembling worlds. A forest.
> 
> I like to mix up the format for -empyre- a little, and so I'm introducing a *caravan* of creative thinkers, and Shu Lea will add as the week goes on. This week will need a LOT of voices, to inch toward the catastrophe, to try and turn away from the future, to deal with NOW. So I hope the readership will feel very invited to participate. Needed.
> 
> Fabi Borges (BR)
> Fabiane M. Borges: Acts at the intersection between clinic, art and technology. She works as a Psychologist (in person and online) and as an essayist, having written and organized publications between academic journals, collections and personal books. She articulates two international networks/festivals: Technoshamanism (technology & ancestry) and Intergalactic Commune (art & space sciences). She has a Post-phd in Visual Arts at EBA / UFRJ - School of Fine Arts, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro / 2016-2018. She did a Phd in Visual Arts at Goldsmiths University of London / 2011, and currently she is doing two post-phd: one at ECA / USP (School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo / 2019) the other at ETE / INPE (Space Engineering and Technology at the National Institute for Space Research / 2019), both dedicated to art and science focused on space projects that also include terrestrial systems and Philosophy of science. Since July 2019, she organizes SACIE (Subjectivity, Art and Space Sciences) a research program and artistic residencies in the Brazilian space program (INPE), where she develops a series of activities focused on Space Culture. She is the organizer of Extremophilia magazine, launched in 2018. As her academic background is in Psychology, with a master's degree and phd in Clinical Psychology (PUC / SP), all her work has a focus on the production of subjectivity. Acting on the frontier between Art and Clinic, having developed several immersive programs focused on dream and imaginary levels, operating with fiction, speculation, creation. Some of her actions have been supported by institutions such as Goethe Institute, SESC, MAC, MAST, MAR, Museum of Tomorrow, Valongo Observatory, Ibirapuera Planetarium, Nucleus of Arts and New Organisms PPGAV / UFRJ - (Brazil), Center for Contemporary Art (Ecuador), Aarhus University - Department of Information Studies & Digital Design (Denmark), STWST / Ars Electronica (Austria), SenseLab Concordia University (Canada), XenoEntities (Germany), Transmediale (Germany), Grow Tottenham, Si Shang Art Museum (China), etc. She lives in São Paulo in a collective house that plants organic, organizes parties, concerts, meetings, workshops, etc (Casa Japuanga, SP).
> 
> Amanda McDonald Crowley (USA)
> Amanda McDonald Crowley is an independent cultural worker and curator. Amanda’s work has largely been at the intersection of art + technology working with artists and groups who have a research based practice; and current research interests include #artfoodtech #growfoodmakeart. Amanda develops platforms to generate dialogue, bringing together artists with professionals and amateurs from varied disciplines, and creating space for audience engagement.  In recent years Amanda has developed projects with Kulturföreningen Triennal (Malmo), Bronx Arts Alliance, YMPJ (Bronx), New Media Scotland / Edinburgh Science Festival (Edinburgh), Pixelache (Helsinki), PointB (Brooklyn), Bemis Center (Omaha). Amanda has curatorial and advisor roles on Mary Mattingly’s Swale (NYC), Di Mainstone’s Human Harp (UK), Juanli Carrion’s OSS Project (NYC), Shu Lea Cheang’s CycleX (NY) and Vibha Galhotra’s S.O.U.L Foundation (Delhi), and in summer 2019 Amanda curated Amy Khoshbin’s pop up tattoo parlor in a hotel room for Detroit Art Week in a project that addressed gun violence in America. Amanda has previously worked with Eyebeam art + technology center NY, Australian Network for Art and Technology, ISEA2004, Finland, Adelaide Festival 2002 and has done curatorial residencies at Helsinki International Artists Program (FI), Santa Fe Art Institute (US), Bogliasco Foundation (IT), Sarai New Media Institute (IN), and Banff Center for the Arts (CA). publicartaction.net
> 
> Oliver Kellhammer (USA)
> Oliver Kellhammer is an artist, writer, and researcher, who seeks, through his botanical interventions and social art practice, to demonstrate nature’s surprising ability to recover from damage. Recent work has focused on the psychosocial effects of climate change, decontaminating polluted soil, reintroducing prehistoric trees to landscapes impacted by industrial logging, and cataloging the biodiversity of brownfields. He is currently a lecturer in sustainable systems at Parsons in NYC.
> 
> He has lectured and given artists talks on bio-art, ecological design, urban ecology and permaculture at universities and cultural institutions throughout North America and abroad, including New School, NYU, Rensselaer Polytechnic, OTIS College, University of Oregon, Emily Carr University, Smith College, University of British Columbia, Bainbridge Graduate Institute, University of Windsor, Aalto University (Finland) Tohoku University (Japan).
> 
> Escher Tsai (TW) 
> Escher Tsai, New Media Art Artist, Producer, Creative Director of Dimension Plus,
> Director of Arts and Technology: Creative Innovation and Counseling Project, Production supervisor of “3x3x6”Taiwan Exhibition in 58th Venice Biennale. He devotes himself into open culture and new media art research, promotion and creation. He was project manager of Acer Digital Art Centre, planner of many new media arts creation and centre, host of Digital art exchange platform.
> 
> Established by Escher Tsai and Keith Lam, well-known curator and artist from Taiwan and Hong Kong, Dimension Plus is a creative team that devotes themselves to the interactive digital environment. We are constantly been generating new ideas that deal with digital and analog technologies. We also dedicate ourselves to digital art education and environment change. http://dimensionplus.co/, http://www.dimensionplus.co/en/projects/soybean.html, (see also: http://www.makery.info/2019/09/10/les-futurs-du-soja-nourrissent-le-debat-en-marge-dars-electronica/?fbclid=IwAR0zdRyzTktIVHHOsXsM1C1JHgec0eg5E7Yvz0g0JO-W0UDRa-AEZtDFRCE)
> 
> Dan Phiffer (USA)
> Dan Phiffer is a software developer and artist who builds web-based tools for the American Civil Liberties Union. His previous job was working on an open data gazetteer called Who’s On First (part of the open source mapping company Mapzen). This Fall he’s teaching a hacktivism course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has started organizing with Extinction Rebellion in the New York Capital Region.
> 
> Dawn Weleski (USA)
> Dawn Weleski’s art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by re-purposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Recent projects include The Black Draft (with Justin Strong), a live
> mock sports draft event during which ten Black former Pittsburghers, from all professions, are drafted to return home and City Council Wrestling, a series of public wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters. She co-founded and co-directs Conflict Kitchen (with Jon Rubin), a take-out restaurant that serves cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict, which has been covered by over 900 international media and news outlets worldwide and was the North American finalist for the Second Annual International Award for Public Art in 2015.
> 
> Weleski has exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Anyang Public Art Project, South Korea; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Project Row Houses, Houston; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Festival Belluard Bollwerk International, Switzerland; The Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh; Arts House, Melbourne; and 91mQ, Berlin; has been a resident at The
> Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA Mexico City, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; is a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow.
> 
> Currently, Weleski is NEH Visiting Assistant Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University.
> 
> --
> beforebefore.net
> --
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> -- 
> -- Prof. Dr. Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum
> -- Pós-Graduação Tec.da Inteligência e Design Digital - TIDD (PUC-SP)
> -- Coordenador Pós-Graduação em Música e Imagem (FASM)
> 
> -- http://soundcloud.com/sergiobasbaum
> -- http://soundcloud.com/pantharei
> -- [:a.cinema:]
> ...sai dessa fila, vem pra roda festejar..
> -- a.cinema
> -- pantharei_tube
> 
> B'H'
> 
> "Do mesmo modo como a percepção da coisa me abre ao ser, realizando a síntese paradoxal de uma infinidade de aspectos perspectivos, a percepção do outro funda a moralidade (...)"
> Maurice Merleau-Ponty
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://www.oliverk.org
> twitter: @okellhammer
> mobile: 917-743-0126
> skype: okellhammer
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> -- 
> -- Prof. Dr. Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum
> -- Pós-Graduação Tec.da Inteligência e Design Digital - TIDD (PUC-SP)
> -- Coordenador Pós-Graduação em Música e Imagem (FASM)
> 
> -- http://soundcloud.com/sergiobasbaum
> -- http://soundcloud.com/pantharei
> -- [:a.cinema:]
> ...sai dessa fila, vem pra roda festejar..
> -- a.cinema
> -- pantharei_tube
> 
> B'H'
> 
> "Do mesmo modo como a percepção da coisa me abre ao ser, realizando a síntese paradoxal de uma infinidade de aspectos perspectivos, a percepção do outro funda a moralidade (...)"
> Maurice Merleau-Ponty
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://catahistorias.wordpress.com
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> -- 
> -- Prof. Dr. Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum
> -- Pós-Graduação Tec.da Inteligência e Design Digital - TIDD (PUC-SP)
> -- Coordenador Pós-Graduação em Música e Imagem (FASM)
> 
> -- http://soundcloud.com/sergiobasbaum
> -- http://soundcloud.com/pantharei
> -- [:a.cinema:]
> ...sai dessa fila, vem pra roda festejar..
> -- a.cinema
> -- pantharei_tube
> 
> B'H'
> 
> "Do mesmo modo como a percepção da coisa me abre ao ser, realizando a síntese paradoxal de uma infinidade de aspectos perspectivos, a percepção do outro funda a moralidade (...)"
> Maurice Merleau-Ponty
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://www.oliverk.org
> twitter: @okellhammer
> mobile: 917-743-0126
> skype: okellhammer
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dawn Weleski
> Colgate University NEH Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Art History, 2019-20
> dawnweleski.com
> conflictkitchen.org
> --
> dawnweleski at gmail dot com
> (724) 681 388six
> --
> Pronouns: she/her/hers & they/their/theirs
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu