How many travelers, seduced by the music of these siren-words - nomadic machines and deterritorializations, smooth or striated spaces, crystal images, rhizomes, and lines of flight - are led into an enchanted lake or trapped in a hall of mirrors, unable to do anything but endlessly echo the siren’s song!
In our conversations about prisons,
criminalization, and the climate crisis, Ruthie and I talk a lot about
extraction. Because it is the violence of extraction that is killing
imprisoned people, the natural world, and all of us, as we live and
breathe in a collapsing biosphere. Extraction and bordering are the
drivers of the apocalypse, and they are also shaping our experience of
this catastrophic era. Many people frame prison abolition within a
larger, generalized arc, in which chattel slavery and U.S. prisons are
part of a single, continuous process […]. I came to
understand the prison-industrial complex as a distinct mechanism that
must be countered on its own terms. […] As Ruthie taught me, people are extracted from our communities,
and then the defining resource of life itself, time, is “extracted from
the extracted.” Time is stripped from the “territory of selves.”
[…]
Rather than understanding time in mere
countable units, some Indigenous cultures measure time in life events,
relationships and seasonal changes. Some understand time as being
fundamentally related to place. Runa communities of Ecuador believe in
the concept of a ‘living future’, wherein the future is “interlinked
with practices of everyday life” and also rooted in a person’s spiritual
connection to animals and the natural world. Such understandings of
time underline what’s being extracted from imprisoned people — not
abstract units of measurement, but their human experience of other
people, places and beings that are the stuff of life itself.
On my own
reservation, early in the pandemic, elders in a local women’s group told
members to view social distancing as a form of fasting — a time to
abstain from togetherness and contemplate what they had made of their
time with others, up to now, and what they would make of it in the
future. To me, the idea of giving up time with one’s community as a form
of fasting, because we are indeed social beings, nourished by human
interaction, highlights the reality that the forced isolation imprisoned
people experience is a form of social and spiritual starvation — a
siphoning away of life.
In a variety of ways, capitalism is
stripping us all of time. Labor. The years that pollution and
contamination rip away from us. The ongoing climate catastrophes that
could end or displace any of us at any time. Many people experience such
losses steadily without reconciling what’s being taken from them, or
that a system and its operators are directly responsible for that theft.
Meanwhile, people who are acutely aware of what is being stolen from
us, who are fighting to curb the damage, are being punished and
isolated. Water Protectors, for example, are being hyper-criminalized
with outlandish charges. In retaliation for their efforts to halt
extraction, they are being extracted from their communities, isolated,
as time is extracted from their lives by the carceral state.
[…]
We are all experiencing the theft of
time. As the world becomes less habitable, and more people are
displaced, we are living in a collapsing box, where borders and the
extraction of time redraw boundaries of habitability and survival, and
more and more people find themselves zoned into death worlds and
sacrifice zones. On a long enough timeline, under capitalism, the entire
world is a sacrifice zone. Bordering, partitioning and extraction are
the apocalypse. Prisons, and other sites of detention, are the hyper
embodiment of these phenomenon, and of what they do to human bodies, as
well as the natural world. The struggle for abolition is a fight for the
future. It is the work of making place, in defiance of bordering and
extraction. It is a refusal to experience collapse on the oppressor’s
terms, because when it comes to who we can save and what we can heal,
the exploration of our collective potential has barely begun. Can we
build new worlds together that cannot be crushed or contained by the
collapsing box of carcerality? I believe that work is already happening,
and that it is up to each of us to find our place, and to seed what
must be grown.
——-
Text by: Kelly Hayes. From: “Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition, the Climate Crisis and What Must Be Done.” Truthout. 14 April 2022. [Though this is promoted as an interview of Gilmore, all here are the words of Kelly Hayes.]
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
—Gerhard Scholem, “Gruss vom Angelus”
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
The sheer plethora of fundraising releases for Ukraine can be overwhelming, from single tracks by music stars such as Sakamato to monster compilation just shy of 200 tracks. The music world has reacted quickly, with the first releases, like Gost Zvuk’s Stop the War! coming out a mere two days after Russia’s invasion.
Proceeds are going to different causes, ranging from the Red Cross to BIPoC,…
I tell you, little man, life’s fall guys, beaten, fleeced to the bone, sweated from time immemorial, I warn you, that when the princes of this world start loving you, it means they’re going to grind you up into battle sausage…
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (via sun-death)
“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.” ― Edward W. Said, Orientalism
Lithuanian filmmaker Kvedaravičius was executed by Russian soldiers, not killed by missile, associate says. The Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius was abducted by Russian soldiers and executed, according to 15min.lt. It was previously reported that he was killed when a missile hit his car near Mariupol, Ukraine.
“Heartless Russian soldiers abducted Mantas and murdered him. And then just left him there,” 15min.lt quotes Lvutina’s post on Facebook.
“We lost a creator well known in Lithuania and in the whole world, who, until the very last moment, in spite of danger, worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said in a statement.
Best known for “Mariupolis,” which portrays Ukrainian citizens going on with their lives while besieged in the Southern port city by Russian-backed fighters in 2014, Kvedaravicius was previously in Berlin with his 2011 doc “Barzakh,” shot in the Russian region of Chechnya as it recovers from the war with Russia, laying bare the reality of life there. The film was given a prize by Amnesty International at the Berlinale that year.
In 2019 Kvedaravicius attended Venice where “Parthenon,” his third film — and first incursion into fiction narrative, albeit mixed with documentary techniques — premiered in the Venice Critics’ Week section. Kvedaravicius’ feature film debut was based on three years of anthropological research among marginal communities in Odessa, Istanbul, and Athens.
“Mantas Kvedaravicius was a unique human being. Maddeningly stubborn; a one-of-a-kind artist,” said Locarno Film Festival director Giona A. Nazzaro, who at that time headed the Venice Critics’ Week, in a Facebook post in which he also praised the pic for its “hauntingly powerful images.”
“He conjured a painful beauty. Ferocious poetry. Mantas was like a seer. He knew what was coming and decided he wanted to see it up close,” Nazzaro added.
“We will miss you, Mantas. You sure taught us a hard lesson.”
The Vilnius International Film Festival paid tribute to Kvedaravicius with a minute of silence during its closing ceremony on Sunday.
“We lost a director who did a heroic job documenting the atrocities of the war,” said the fest’s director Algirdas Ramaška, who noted that “Mantas himself did not like to talk.”
“Mantas dedicated his work to the areas of conflict, the reality of war and the humanity that shines in that darkness. His cinema was and will be very important not only today.”
