What Remains at the End of the Earth?, Imani Jacqueline Brown (2022) (EMPIRE LINES x Hayward Gallery)

Multimedia artist and activist Imani Jacqueline Brown maps out the long history of extractivism in southern America, constellating 18th century settler colonialism, oil and gas extraction, and contemporary environmental crises.

South of the Mississippi River sits the US state of Louisiana, a place transformed from ‘Plantation County’ in the 1700s, to an ‘apartheid state’, and today, ‘Cancer Alley’, for its polluted land and water. Colonial legacies have contributed to contemporary environment problems - including Hurricane Katrina - and continue to shape community planning and housing, a phenomenon known as ‘extractivism’.

Artist Imani Jacqueline Brown pushes back against the ‘segregation’ of human/nature, and Black humans from humanity, in her multidisciplinary practice. The artist shares how culture is too ‘entangled’ with public political action, and her ‘grassroots research’ in permit applications awarded to fossil fuel businesses like Texaco (now Chevron) and the Colonial Pipeline Company. The artist describes how she has collaborated to map enslaved peoples’ burial grounds, as marked by magnolia trees, highlighting pan-African traditions of ecological regeneration. Drawing on her work with Follow the Oil and Occupy Museums, Brown suggests that culture and capitalism are often closely linked - and the unique power of repackaging these projects in the form of artistic constellations.

What Remains at the End of the Earth? (2022) is on view at Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis, which runs at the Hayward Gallery in London until 3 September 2023, part of the Southbank Centre’s Planet Summer with Gaia Art Foundation.

WITH: Imani Jacqueline Brown, artist, activist, writer, and researcher from New Orleans, now based in London. She is a research fellow at Forensic Architecture.

ART: ‘What Remains at the End of the Earth?, Imani Jacqueline Brown (2022)’.

IMAGE: Installation View.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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