How do we engage with the colonial present? This question is central to Planetary Portals Collective, and on the 8 December they will present two related bodies of recent work: the launch of the newly published book, Red Earth, by Michael Salu and a performance-reading of Diamond Power by the Collective (Michael Salu, Kathryn Yusoff, Kerry Holden and 3S member Casper Laing Ebbensgaard).
Join us at Peckham Levels, 5 Floor, 95A Rye Lane, SE15 4ST, London
Pre-drinks from 6pm – Readings 7-9pm – Drinks and disco until late.
About Red Earth: Conversing with Dante, Yoruba metaphysics and probabilistic computation, Red Earth is an expansive text and the source material for Michael Salu’s broader interdisciplinary artistic study, where machine learning is central to various processes to ask whether computational translation can be used to engage alternative cosmologies.
About Planetary Portals: The Planetary Portals Collective examines these colonial afterlives of extractive industries in southern Africa, drawing attention to their social and environmental costs across the continent. We investigate how colonial dreams of Empire have been and still are sustained through ‘changes of states’ exemplified in today’s mining of rare earth elements (REEs) and their transformation into the digital data infrastructures of techno-utopian futures. Colonialism is an ongoing material present that requires counter-poetics, which challenge its planetary passage and modes of affective and material reproduction.
