On Beauty and Terror Part 2: Social Life as Science Fiction

Matri-Archi(tecture)

Although our existence is shaped by this violence (of coloniality, of patriarchy, the violent normalisation of heterosexuality (heteronormativity), the rule of capital), we also exist outside of this; we are not only oppressed beings, our resilience and agency cannot be silenced, that is a further source of dispossession. Once again, we are ‘reckoning with the artistic expressions of the marginalised’ (McCarthy), we are looking at doing what Saidiya Hartman does when she, ‘[makes] productive sense of the gaps and silences in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that absent the voices of enslaved women’. While the idea of our beings exists in this current form, this form is not the only way that we exist and we are not the only ones who are here functioning under a regimented regulated existence, how are the animals, the plants, the water, the rivers, and oceans and trees holding up and surviving? How are we (collectively) doing? There is a deep connection between the social and the ecological, living under the ‘coloniality of being’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). This episode is narrated by Khensani de Klerk and was written by Ndjha Ka; originally published as an article on February 28th 2018.