Department of Xenogenesis: The Equation of Value

Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Collective are pleased to announce the second movement in its ongoing pedagogical platform DXG: Department of Xenogenesis.
This is the first 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 inseparability 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 first discussion The Otolith Collective discusses Denise Ferreira da Silva’s ongoing theorization of Black Feminist Poethics that seeks to emancipate ‘the Category of Blackness from the scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place…’ In her recent writings, Ferreira da Silva turns towards mathematical reasoning so as to think through the ‘unquestioned question reiterated by the disregard for lives lost in the streets of the US and in the Mediterranean Sea: Why don’t black lives matter?’ Ferreira da Silva’s formulation of what she calls an Equation of Value informs INFINITY minus Infinity’s aesthetic imagination of blackness as that which holds and hosts the capacity to disrupt life.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is director and professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute (GRSJ). Her academic and artistic works address the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people.
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 on Monday 29th June.