![]() Though Kanders had promised to divest from such industries, his ongoing investments in the military-industrial complex continued to accrue gigantic profits for a US and global economy based on war manufacturing, or what the late Kanaka Maoli Native feminist scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask calls “mili-capitalism.” 2 One focus of the Whitney campaign was to make visible how the weapons companies owned by Kanders, Safariland, and Defense Technology, produced cannisters and smoke grenades used against migrants at the southern US border. The latter campaign eventually led to the conditions that forced billionaire Warren Kanders to step down from the Whitney Museum’s Board of Trustees. 1 Later, I refined this method by watching and learning from Latin American trans*feminists in the struggle against the heteropatriarchal state, as well as by witnessing the successful campaign by Decolonize This Place (that learned from the Palestinian resistance and Standing Rock Sioux activisms). I began this counter form of excavation and documentation in my books Where Memory Dwells, The Extractive Zone, and Beyond the Pink Tide. It also offers a way to dig up and lay bare the infrastructures that have contributed to a toxic world gravely in need of rebalance, redress, repair, and thinking with and beyond extractive capitalism. Such a practice demands that extractive corporate entities be accountable for their art-washing monoculture. Unlike the bulldozer or the military tank ( guanaco), this decolonial critical method reaches into the underlands to see how extractive cultural industries are saturated with unjust wealth and cultural capital accumulation by a billionaire class. Unearthing architectures is a vital way to piece through the colonial Anthropocene by unveiling an urban model in ruins, one that is dependent upon death and destruction here and elsewhere. If architecture has been defined as the art and technique of design and building, then unearthing architectures is the decolonial analytical and activist practice that aims to uncover the financialization of culture, art, and the built environment as the long durée of colonial and neocolonial plunder, profit accumulation, and reinvestment. We must unearth these architectures to contend with the accumulation, dispossessions, and degradations of extractive capitalism in order to give space to the delicate and resilient worlds of the otherwise by developing alternative models for a livable planet. The funneling of profits from resource extraction into the museum and cultural industries, as well as within digital economies, is central to uncovering the submerged capitalist relations and their inevitably close connections to more generalized conditions of pollution. ![]() Indeed, the persistent critique of nuclear modernity and settler colonialism that unveils the complex scales of entanglement with land occupation and the carbon and nuclear economy is an important dimension of what Cuthand and other Indigenous filmmakers offer. Pointing to the pervasiveness of his, and by extension our, creative and intellectual entanglement with extractive industries affords a profound level of reckoning with the extractive beast in our midst. It also situates the complexity of Indigenous trans-masculine personhood and its complex relationalities, strategies, and negotiations with the settler colonial world.Īt the end of the opening scene, Cuthand explains how he too is implicated in the extractive matrix of power, stating that, as an undergraduate, he received a scholarship from an organization funded by a resource extraction company. Instead, through discussion of IVF, egg harvesting, and the instabilities and chemical mutations of the trans-body, the film offers a more intimate and personal take on what it means to live in a neocolonial era of ongoing land exploitation within the liberal Western meta-narrative of progress. But the film’s visual language does not remain at the level of abstraction, or at the dominant scale of extraction. ![]() It is grounded in an Indigi-queer and trans perspective that visualizes how uranium is mined for nuclear power on a global scale. But then, while lying in bed, I realized I already had.”Įxtractions is organized around archival footage of uranium mining and the blasted landscape in northern Saskatchewan, in the Athabasca Basin of Canada. Over a close shot of a moving freight train, the prototypical symbol of modernity, he says, “Someone asked me recently if there is any type of funding that I wouldn’t accept to make art and I said resource extraction. ![]() In the opening of Theo Cuthand’s fifteen-minute film Extractions (2019), the artist remarks upon the inevitable entanglements between the earth’s plundering and the corporate funding of the arts. ![]()
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