Department of Xenogenesis:
Hostile Environment: Environmental Hostility

Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Collective are pleased to announce the second movement in its ongoing pedagogical platform
This is the second of two conversations for the Department of Xenogenesis (DXG) accompanied by an online screening of the film INFINITY minus Infinity, The Otolith Collective (2019, 52 mins). This event is hosted and supported by LUX.
Six months into 2020, it is clear that the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic with the eugenic calculations of the UK’s Conservative government has disproportionately exposed Afrodiasporic, Caribbean, Asian and Latinx peoples to the risk of infection and premature death. At the same time, the global uprisings against the lethal policing of Black and Brown peoples and the destruction of monuments that valorise slavery challenge the disregard for Black lives that characterises what Saidiya V. Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery in the United States with a sustained seriousness that has no precedence or parallel in the 21st Century.
What happens, however, if we redirect Hartman’s account of the racial calculus that devalues Black existence towards the United Kingdom? To think the afterlife of slavery as a British project in a British context requires a confrontation with the implications of the policy of hostile environment announced in 2014 by Theresa May. It entails thinking the distress inflicted by the British state upon the Windrush generation in terms of an ongoing practice of environmental hostility. It necessitates an account of the occluded afterlife of British slavery as it accumulates around the compounded times and spaces of 1833, 2030, 1610, 1948 and beyond.
There is a great desire, a yearning and a need in Britain today for a discourse that reckons with these questions in a vocabulary whose complexity exceeds the familiar tropes of journalistic reportage. A desire evident in the reading lists and reading groups that circulate online. The existence of DXG speaks to, and from this desire. The Otolith Group’s INFINITY minus Infinity, which premiered in November 2019 at the First Sharjah Architecture Triennale, sets itself the task of rendering the afterlife of slavery in the UK. It is an act, a gesture, a program and a proposal for aesthetic education in the Disunited Kingdom.
From the perspective of the present, INFINITY minus Infinity’s evocation of the perpetual hostility of Britain’s environment appears as an all too prescient portrait of the United Kingdom’s occulted climate of anti-blackness. In this durational drama of imperilled existence, racial capitalism is envisioned as an ongoing process of extraction through which the Capitalocene is lived.
What is pictured is a cosmodrama that insists on the inseperability of climate from race and expiration from pollution. A cosmos informed by black feminist thought that draws upon the anti-imperialist poetics of Una Marson, the alluvial incantations of Édouard Glissant, the black feminist poethics of Denise Ferreira da Silva and the Black Anthropocene of Kathryn Yusoff.
For this second conversation The Otolith Collective are in conversation with sound artist and writer Esi Eshun, poet Dante Michaux and composer and performer Elaine Mitchener.
As researchers and performers in INFINITY minus Infinity, Esi Eshun, Dante Micheaux and Elaine Mitchener collaborated with Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun on the collective theorization of the hostile environment as the modality through which the afterlife of slavery is lived in the United Kingdom today. In conversation with The Otolith Collective, Eshun, Micheaux and Mitchener discuss the compounded timelines of racial capitalism that accretes in the present of the UK from the perspectives of black feminist thought developed by Una Marson, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Saidiya V. Hartman, Christina Sharpe and Kathryn Yusoff.
Esi Eshun is a London based multidisciplinary artist and independent researcher who works primarily with text, sound and performance to investigate some of the socio-economic, psychological and philosophical contradictions of colonialism and its continuing geopolitical and ecological significances. Her solo and collaborative projects have been presented across a variety of platforms in the UK and internationally.
Dante Micheaux is author of Amorous Shepherd (2010) and Circus (2018), which won the 2019 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation. His poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, PN Review, The African American Review and Tongue—among other journals and anthologies. He has been shortlisted for the Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize. Micheaux’s other honours include fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and The New York Times Foundation.
Elaine Mitchener Born and raised in East London of Jamaican heritage Elaine Mitchener is a contemporary vocalist, movement artist and composer, whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary/experimental music theatre and dance. She has performed and collaborated with numerous leading artists including Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), Mark Padmore,
INFINITY minus Infinity, Otolith Collective (2019, 52 mins), will be available to view from 17.30 British Standard Time on Monday 29 June until 17.30 British Standard Time on Wednesday 1 July.
Attendees will be sent a Zoom link for the talk and an online link to watch the film from Monday 29th June.