Extraction designates capitalism’s fundamental logic of withdrawal—of value, nutrients, energy, labor, time—from people, lands, culture, life-forms, and the elements. It signals that these withdrawals are made without corresponding deposits except in the form of pollution, waste, climate change, illness, and death, which are unequally distributed along racialized, gendered, sexualized, and class-based lines. Extraction, therefore, determines the conditions of living and dying in the era of fossil fuel capitalism and catastrophic climate change.
Under the rubric of extraction, an influential and diverse group of thinkers, artists, and activists will give presentations, screen artworks and films, and lead discussions that raise questions about how this politics of disaster is being visualized, negotiated, and contested, in places as far-ranging and interconnected as British Columbia, North Dakota, Chicago, and California. They will consider the roles cultural producers such as socially engaged artists, anti-colonial legal activists, Indigenous water protectors, media theorists, writers, architects, and designers play in envisioning and negating extractive politics and policies.
Invited guests and conference participants will collectively ask:
Faced with multiple tipping points moving us implacably toward a catastrophic environmentally altered future—and now with a US president hostile to climate science and industrial regulations—how might we together create possibilities for living non-extractively?
This conference is organized by T.J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies and A. Laurie Palmer, with Rachel Nelson of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and Chessa Adsit-Morris.
This event is FREE and open to the schedule.
Conference Schedule
Friday May 12, 10:30am - 6pm
College 9/10 Multipurpose Room, UCSC
Introduction: Laurie Palmer and T.J. Demos
Jason W. Moore
Binghamton University, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, 2015
Angela Melitopoulos and Angela Anderson
EU-based research artists, on gold mining in the Northern Greece
Anne Quirynen
Berlin-based artist, on extraction and speculative fabulation
Claire Pentecost
Chicago-based artist investigating petcoke, tracing dirty energy
Screening of Fractured Land (2015)
Introduction by Caleb Behn
Saturday May 13, 10 am- 4:30pm
Resource Center for Nonviolence, 612 Ocean Street, Santa Cruz
Caleb Behn (Eh-Cho Dene and Dunne Za/Cree)
Indigenous legal activism against extraction in British Columbia
Wašté Win Young (Wichiyena Dakota and Hunkpapa Lakota)
Speaking on the Standing Rock Indigenous resistance movement
Brian Holmes
Chicago-based artist speaking on Petropolis, US fossil-fuel infrastructure
Isabelle Carbonell
UCSC-based filmmaker addressing Bento Rodrigues dam disaster in Brazil
Mary Hsia-Coron and Andy Hsia-Coron
Anti-fracking activists, San Benito County
Ann López
Center for Farmworkers Families, Watsonville
The Extraction Conference is sponsored generously by the Center for Creative Ecologies, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, the Center for Documentary Arts and Research, the UC Santa Cruz Arts Research Institute, Colleges Nine and Ten, and the UCSC American Indian Resource Center.