To address today’s political conjunctures, it becomes crucial to study the link between extractivism and warfare as pillars of capitalist democracy and global colonialism. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) has been warning us about the present storm, underlining how the global territorial reordering between imperialist powers has turned into a total war threatening all forms of life: the living, the dead, and the non-dead. The present storm carries a monster of multiple heads, the capitalist hydra – as they name multilayered systematic oppression and exploitation with a voracious ecocidal drive. The Zapatistas have also warned us that in the face of this growing threat, “there will be no landscape left to account for.”
This talk will debate some characteristics of the present storm by analyzing contemporary mechanisms that are renewing the systematic forms of global oppression and exploitation in the context of Mexico. To set the context, it will focus on the 2019 infrastructural National Development Plan, the interrelated impacts, and characteristics of involved actors: military, paramilitary, organized crime, national and transnational corporations. The implementation of these projects carries a documented violent dispossession of communal and agrarian territories, targeted incarceration of land defenders, disappearances and murders, displacement and dissolution of communities, destruction of cultural artifacts and archeological sites, erosion of vital ecosystems, scorched atmospheres, and the risk of irreversible ecological consequences.
It will zoom into the present multilayered critical scenario of the south and southeast Mexican regions, setting grounds for introducing a few keys to the historical indigenous and non-indigenous resistance in the struggle for self-determination and autonomy at the heart of an aesthetic praxis. **/
David Muñoz-Alcántara is a guest professor in Media Art at the HfG. Alistair Hudson is the Scientific-Artistic Chairman of the ZKM.
UMBAU is an online journal for the promotion of art, research, and design emerging from Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG).
In 1992, a time of major socio-economic and technological change, the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design was founded as a “digital Bauhaus.” UMBAU, an architectural term roughly translatable as “remodeling” (to take a given structure and adjust it to contemporary situations) addresses this heritage and introduces a moment of destabilisation. UMBAU welcomes trans-disciplinary modes of thinking through the situational, the unfinished, and the transitional.
Through bi-weekly contributions from international artists, scientists, philosophers, historians and designers, UMBAU captures up-to-date research, while its annual editorial themes enable an in-depth exploration of ideas.
Concept by
Matthias Bruhn, Katharina Weinstock.
Founded by
Katharina Weinstock.
Founding members
Ariana Dongus, Friederike Schäfer, Katharina Weinstock.
Am 7. Juni findet die Bunte Nacht der Digitalisierung statt, ein Festival, das die Vielfalt der Perspektiven und Herausforderungen der Digitalisierung in Karlsruhe feiert. Diese Initiative öffnet den Karlsruher Bürgern die Türen von mehr als 60 Institutionen (Bibliotheken, Museen, Universitäten, Unternehmen, Bürgerinitiativen), um verschiedene Themen und Ansätze zur Digitalisierung zu zeigen und zu diskutieren.
Beschreibung (en)
On June 7th, the Colourful Night of Digitization, a festival to celebrate the diversity of perspectives and challenges on digitization that exists in Karlsruhe, will take place. This initiative opens the doors of more than 60 institutions (libraries, museums, universities, enterprises, civil initiatives) to the citizens of Karlsruhe to show and discuss diverse topics and approaches to digitality.