I am a visual artist, writer and researcher based in The Hague. My research focuses on imagining non-consumptive, reciprocal ways of living alongside more-than-human beings in the context of an expanded deep ecology. Informed by authors who bring to light the links between the exploitation and maiming of our vital surroundings and the exploitation and maiming of human minorities, I am interested in how manipulating language can inform new ontologies for beyond the petro-present.
Part of this effort involves researching the stakes of linguistic imperialism whithin the Western archive of other-than-human beings. Understanding the links between language and the production and displacement of people, knowledge and value as well as working towards a widespread literacy of cross-species care, agency and shared labor is crucial for enacting durable, non-exploitative ways of living.
I am currently investigating the politics of wildlife conservation and its roots in colonial prospecting, a mode of rendering land that is based on speculation, reduction and extraction. I propose that the conservation narrative requires and indeed produces a choreography of dislocation - both of physical bodies and epistemic, symbolic and economic value - to sustain itself. In this sense I approach conservation as a performance: as a fabrication for cultural consumption and as a series of physical, discursive and epistemic movements. I argue that this performance hinges on the devaluation and invisibilization of Indigenous knowledge of and relations to the subjects of conservation.
What links all of my research projects is the desire to examine cultural, political and economic systems which feed logics of consumption as the primary and basal mode of relation between species and between individuals.
Part of this effort involves researching the stakes of linguistic imperialism whithin the Western archive of other-than-human beings. Understanding the links between language and the production and displacement of people, knowledge and value as well as working towards a widespread literacy of cross-species care, agency and shared labor is crucial for enacting durable, non-exploitative ways of living.
I am currently investigating the politics of wildlife conservation and its roots in colonial prospecting, a mode of rendering land that is based on speculation, reduction and extraction. I propose that the conservation narrative requires and indeed produces a choreography of dislocation - both of physical bodies and epistemic, symbolic and economic value - to sustain itself. In this sense I approach conservation as a performance: as a fabrication for cultural consumption and as a series of physical, discursive and epistemic movements. I argue that this performance hinges on the devaluation and invisibilization of Indigenous knowledge of and relations to the subjects of conservation.
What links all of my research projects is the desire to examine cultural, political and economic systems which feed logics of consumption as the primary and basal mode of relation between species and between individuals.