FA’s Eyal Weizman, Samaneh Moafi and Imani Jacqueline Brown will be participating in sessions across the two-day conference – visit the Biennial website for the full programme.

The conference will be in English, with simultaneous translation into German. Attendance is possible without advance registration, and admission is free.

In 1991, a memo drafted by the World Bank and signed by Larry Summers was leaked to the press. It included the suggestion that dumping toxic waste in so-called Third World countries would be a sound economic policy.

Though it is widely recognized that European imperial expansion, from the fifteenth century onward, had a crucial environmental impact, reshaping the earth’s ecology, the word imperialism disappeared from our political vocabulary and hardly ever appears in present-day discourses. The factories of Victorian England, as Lorraine Daston has noted, are still at work in the earth’s atmosphere, but we tend to obscure the ongoing feedback loop between industrialization and imperialism. This is the case because present-day imperialism is not so much about militarism and warfare, but about collusion between sovereign power and monopoly commerce, thus outsourcing coercion to financial markets. As we undergo the worst environmental crisis in human history, IMPERIAL ECOLOGIES contends that to speak of imperialism today is not obsolete or passé—but urgent and timely. In order to illuminate the current climate emergency, it is important to tie the making of the Western world to the unmaking of countless life worlds, examining not only the environmental impact of settler societies but also the imbrication of monopoly commerce and resource depletion—from the Dutch East India Company’s destruction of nutmeg trees to the ongoing monoculture expansion, threatening tropical forest biodiversity.

The conference will also address the question of language, and the insistence on abstraction, as part of the rhetorical repertoire used to render imperialism invisible, as well as the legacies of empire that operate below the threshold of consciousness in what one could call the colonial unconscious.

Curated by: Kader Attia

This conference is part of the discursive program of the 12th Berlin Biennale. Taking the restitution debate as a starting point, it explores how colonialism and imperialism continue to operate in the present.