BEYOND THE EXTRACTIVE ZONE
1 March 2019, 7:30pm
Room 230
OCAD University
100 McCaul St. Toronto
While we might understand extractivism as the logic of reducing nature to commodities, and the resultant imperialist hyper-exploitation of the mining, oil, and gas industries, for instance, we can also attune ourselves not only to the physical extraction of resources, but also to the ideology that treats Indigenous/community knowledge as itself a resource to be extracted.
How can moving images enable us to see and think differently? Can experimental documentary and ethnographic works allow us to “question what lies beneath the visible world of the extractive zone and to seek out less perceivable worlds, life forms, and the organization of relations within them, while creating new methods that allow for this tracking”?
“Beyond the Extractive Zone,” a film screening and discussion co-programmed by Zoë Heyn-Jones with the re:assemblage collective, and presented with the support of OCAD’s Culture Shifts, considers (anti)extractivism from Indigenous and mestizx perspectives.
The Case of Gran Colombia Gold - Crude Gold
(Monica Gutierrez, Colombia/Canada, 2014, 10 minutes, documentary)
“The story of how Gran Colombia Gold came to be formed is the story the abuses of power against a workers union as a rightful owner of the mine. The video will focus on the situation in Segovia, a town with a long and proud tradition in gold mining. The Toronto-based corporation may be involved with the murder of president of the Regional Union Mining and Energy workers, Rafael Tobon Zea, in 2011, and has been accused of paramilitary connections.”
—Monica Gutierrez
Dejar de ser amenaza para convertirnos en promesa / To Stop Being a Threat and To Become a Promise (Carolina Caycedo, Colombia/UK, 2017, 8 minutes, two channel documentary)
“Weaving footage from diverse hydrographies such as the Colorado, the Yaqui, the Xingu, the Spree and the Magdalena Rivers, the two channels contrast the indigenous and rural 'campesino' lifestyle, with the extractivist approach to water and land, by juxtaposing encountered perspectives and understandings of what a territory is, and how it may be inhabited. Along the video, the indigenous perspective casts visual spells on the extractive one, making it wobble, shake, unfold, and eventually transforming it into a spiritual vision.”
—Carolina Caycedo
Kiruna – Rymdvägen (Liselotte Wajstedt, Sweden, 2013, 52 minutes, documentary)
The town Kiruna is to be moved. The mining activities underground threaten its foundation. Houses will be moved, or torn down, and new quarters will be built on another site. The director grew up on the Company Site and is in a hurry to catch up with her past, for soon its physical reminders will be gone.
This screening is a component of the “Resisting Extractivism, Performing Opposition” project, supported by the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas, York University’s Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance Studies and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, and OCAD University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences & School of Interdisciplinary Studies, with the support of the Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories and Criticism and Curatorial Practice programs.