Home |Research & Publications|Prospections | Usufructuaries of earth
psp.95.screenshot_20240502_at_125227.webp
Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital

Author(s)
Denise Ferreira da Silva

Originally published in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (Duke University Press, 2020), this essay, "Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital" by academic, philosopher, and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva is shared here in the context of the project Usufructuaries of earth, co-convened by BAK with artist Marwa Arsanios. This chapter is one of the readings for the Berlin reading group convened by Joud Al-Tamimi and Lama El-Khatib, titled “On Value-Disrupting Activity,” at Hopscotch reading room, 5 May 2024. This reading group explores the political and theoretical stakes of value as it links to violences enacted on and through land and property in Palestine and elsewhere.

Image: Denise Ferreira da Silva, speaking as part of the “Spectral Labor and Unpayable Debt” panel during the 2-day online symposium As for Protocols—To Hold Things Together, curated by BAK for Vera List, 20–21 May 2021.

"Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital" originally appeared in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (2020). It is republished here with the kind permission of the author and Duke University Press. The editors of the original volume in which this essay was published are Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith.

Related
psp.100.screenshot_20241026_at_153709.webp
4 October 2024
Failing, Dreaming, Doing: Rehearsing Abolition

Convened by Johannesburg-based Yvonne Phyllis and MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho), the working session Failing, Dreaming, Doing: rehearsing abolition sought to conjure alternate imaginaries of life and labor with earth, beyond the regimes of colonial and racial enclosure. The following text was collectively written by the working session’s participants: Brenna Bhandar, Aya Bseiso, Layal Ftouni, Jennifer Irving, Tareq Khalaf, Gelare Khoshgozara, MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho), Marie Nour Hechaime, Yvonne Phyllis, Philip Rizk, Bobby Sayers, Shela Sheikh, and Kasia Wlaszczyk and was read out by Nare Mokgotho as part of “PROPOSITION 3 Failing, Dreaming, Doing: rehearsing abolition” during the Usufructuaries of earth convention public program, Saturday 25 May 2024 at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst.

psp.101.berlin_cover_image.webp
10 June 2024
Harvesting: Berlin Reading Group

Held in the context of Usufructuaries of earth: Chapter two, reading groups and publication, a reading group spanning two days was convened by Joud Al-Tamimi and Lama El Khatib on 4 and 5 May 2024 titled And in your throats, a sliver of glass, a cactus thorn and On Value-Disrupting Activity, at bookstore خان الجنوب khan Aljanub, Berlin and Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin respectively. Mokia Laisin put together a collaborative collage of annotations made during both days of the reading group discussions with input from Miriam Gatt on 4 May 2024.

Marwa Arsanios, Untitled, silkscreen on
Marwa Arsanios, Untitled, silkscreen on linen canvas, 2023. Photo: Tom Phillip Janssen
21 May 2024
Enclosures from Below: The Mushaa’ in Contemporary Palestine

This essay, “Enclosures from Below: The Mushaa’ in Contemporary Palestine,” from geographer and researcher Noura Alkhalili is shared as part of the project Usufructuaries of earth, co-convened by BAK with artist Marwa Arsanios. It is one of the readings for the Amman reading group convened by artist-led research group Bahaleen involving locally-invited artists and researchers.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s online contribut
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s online contribution to the conversation “Life and Death Beyond the Boundary,” Usufructuaries of earth convention, 24 May 2024, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, photo: Tom Phillip Janssen
21 May 2024
Scholar-Activists in the Mix

This chapter, “Scholar-Activists in the Mix,” from Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (2022) is shared as part of the project Usufructuaries of earth, co-convened by BAK with artist Marwa Arsanios. It is one of the readings for the Amman reading group convened by artist-led research group Bahaleen involving locally-invited artists and researchers.

psp.97.tpj_bak_usufructuaries_of_earth__convention_day_1_web_17.webp
20 May 2024
Improvement

This chapter, “Improvement,” from legal scholar Brenna Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (2018) is one of the readings for the Amman reading group.

psp.95.screenshot_20240502_at_125227.webp
30 April 2024
Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital

Originally published in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (Duke University Press, 2020), this essay, "Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital" by academic, philosopher, and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva is shared here in the context of the project Usufructuaries of earth, co-convened by BAK with artist Marwa Arsanios. This chapter is one of the readings for the Berlin reading group convened by Joud Al-Tamimi and Lama El-Khatib, titled “On Value-Disrupting Activity,” at Hopscotch reading room, 5 May 2024. This reading group explores the political and theoretical stakes of value as it links to violences enacted on and through land and property in Palestine and elsewhere.

Printing slogans as part of the “Undoi
Printing slogans as part of the “Undoing Debt” reading group which discussed A Feminist Reading of Debt, Kiosk, Rotterdam, 28 April 2024. Photo: Alexandra Martens Serrano
22 April 2024
A Feminist Reading of Debt (excerpts)

Three excerpts are republished here from researchers and activists Verónica Gago and Lucí Cavallero’s A Feminist Reading of Debt (London: Pluto Press, 2021). The text opens with a simple concept: that contemporary debt cannot be understood by only looking at “public debt,” and must instead look at the indebtedness present in everyday life. The authors call for debt to be adopted by social movements as a key issue, and furthermore, for people to be cognizant of the links between debt and sexist violence.

psp.93.fred_moten_and_stefano_harney.webp
15 April 2024
Debt and Study

This is an extract from the chapter “Debt and Study,” in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013). Across its three sections—Debt and Credit, Debt and Forgetting, and Debt and Refuge—this extract traces the sites and practices of “desired” and undesired debt that perforate contemporary financial capitalism and western culture. The text moves through different people who are marked as debt carriers, such as the precariat, the student, and racialized people, among others.

psp.90.screenshot_20240413_at_102852.webp
10 April 2024
Riot Now: Square, Street, Commune

“Riot Now: Square, Street, Commune” is a chapter from political theorist Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2016). Taking the classical Greek agora—a place of assembly and commerce—as a starting point, Clover suggests that it is perhaps no coincidence that many of the riots and occupations that emerged in recent decades either happened or began in modern squares. He speaks of how this emergence of rioters corresponded to “an underlying political-economic unity, a material reorganization of society, which provide[d] them a shared set of problems and a shared arena in which to confront them.”

Marwa Arsanios, Chart for the Usership o
Marwa Arsanios, Chart for the Usership of Land, prints on paper, 2022, installation detail, Usufructuaries of earth, chpater one, exhibition, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Ten banners each depiciting a sentence that address the rig
8 April 2024
Palestine & the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a

Charting the interconnectedness of capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism, Peter Linebaugh’s “Palestine & the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a” speaks of “the violence of mapping, titling, buying, and selling which cast people into cities and camps following their expropriation from the land.”

psp.84.screenshot_20240122_at_180037.webp
7 April 2024
Micro-Resistances

Originally published in Kohl Journal, this interview is between Samanta Arango Orozco, a member of Grupo Semillas, and the artist Marwa Arsanios, who is co-convening with BAK the multi-chaptered project Usufructuaries of earth until 2 June, 2024.

psp.91.bak_usufructuariesofearth_phototomphilipjanssen_web_105.webp
7 April 2024
Usufructuaries of earth: a slow-growing table of contents

A slow-growing table of contents for the Usufructuaries of earth online reader. The reader emerges, to begin with, as a constellation of archival texts assembled here through the “Usufructuaries of earth” focus on Prospections. Throughout the duration of Usufructuaries of earth project and beyond, diverse content—long reads, interviews, conversations, and visual interventions—will incrementally be (re)published into a public research and learning curriculum that studies histories and propositions of usufruct, of renewing shared practices of usership of and with earth.

Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid of Ideolog
Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Part 1, film still, 2017
19 March 2024
Ecological Catastrophe: Nature Talks Back

“We are in the siege of a nature that has been hurt, divided, defiled, poisoned, harmed, and made to bleed,” writes Pelşîn Tolhildan, member of the Kurdish Women’s Movement.

psp.85.bak_usufructuariesofearth_phototomphilipjanssen_web_006.webp
7 March 2024
Usufructuaries of earth: exhibition audio tour

Usufructuaries of earth is the first comprehensive exhibition of Marwa Arsanios’s work in the Netherlands. The exhibition foregrounds the artist’s collaborative approach to bringing together ecological, feminist, and decolonial knowledges and practices that put forward ideologies of usufruct, unhinging property-relations from the idiom of individuated possession and toward forms of common, more-than-human userships. Here is an audio tour of the exhibition given by BAK convenor of research and publications Wietske Maas.