Gas Imaginary Conversations No. 1 — with Denise Ferreira da Silva

Below the Radar has partnered with the Or Galley to bring you recordings of the Gas Imaginary Conversations series. In this first of two talks, Rachel O’Reilly is in conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva. This event was presented by the Or Gallery and recorded virtually on Nov. 26, 2020.

Rachel O’Reilly and Denise Ferreira da Silva have had long-standing exchanges on the many concepts and references that run through the Gas Imaginary project. In this conversation, they address the development of The Gas Imaginary and the language of capitalization in regards to land, settler conceptualism, and the violent movement of land to forms of property and sites of speculation-based capital.

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s academic and artistic work address the ethico-political challenges of the global present. Her publications include Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, forthcoming) and as co-editor with Paula Chakravartty, Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her artistic practice includes filmworks Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; in addition to the ongoing relational project, Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She is a professor and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia.

Watch the video recording of this conversation here (closed captioning included in video): https://thegasimaginary.orgalleryprojects.org/talks/

About The Gas Imaginary:
A multi-disciplinary project using poetry, collaborative drawings, installation, moving images, and lectures to unpack the broader significance of ‘settler conceptualism’, the racial logic of the property form and fossil fuel-based labour politics as capital reaches the limits of land use. In ongoing dialogue with elders of Gooreng Gooreng country and settler women activists, where fracking was approved for mass installation in ‘Australia’, new elements of this work address the threatened destruction to 50% of the Northern Territory.
Read more: https://thegasimaginary.orgalleryprojects.org/

— Or Gallery: http://www.orgallery.org/
— Rachel O’Reilly: www.rachel-oreilly.net
— Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/person/denise-ferreira-da-silva/

Image: Rachel O'Reilly, INFRACTIONS, 2019, acrylic paint and marker. Photo: Dennis Ha.