PLEIN AIR TALKS 2. Imani Jacqueline Brown

Roots hold the frontlines of resistance together: Spatial investigations into the continuum of extractivism

A lecture by Imani Jacqueline Brown organized as part of the 2022 Plein Air Talk series.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and researcher from New Orleans. Her work investigates the ‘continuum of extractivism’, which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that form the foundations of settler colonial society, she opens space to imagine paths to ecological reparations.

Imani makes videos and installations, organizes public actions, delivers testimony to organs of the United Nations, occupies billboards, writes polemics, performs lectures, and uses counter-cartographic strategies to map the spatial logics that make geographies, unmake communities, and break Earth’s ecologies. Her work has been presented internationally, including in the US, the UK, Poland, Germany, and the UAE, most recently at the 12th Berlin Biennale.

Imani received her MA with distinction from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2019, and her BA in Anthropology and Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2010. Among other things, she is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London, a research fellow with Forensic Architecture and an associate lecturer in MA Architecture at the Royal College of Arts.

2022 Plein Air Talks is organized in conjunction with the advanced studio series “Plein Air” taught by Nahyun Hwang, initiated in the fall of 2020. The series explores the complex material and socio-political performance of air, and the intersectional vulnerabilities and agencies of air as a critical spatial medium.