Climatologists have confirmed it is now too late to avoid certain global warming and that a shift to a low or zero carbon economy is thus vital. This implies an urgent transition to renewable energy sources as well as radical adaptive measures, which collide against established industrial monopolies. This episode gathers several geoengineering patent applications, and through these documents presents the history of these emerging technologies and the private interests, actors, think tanks, and corporations behind them. Within the debate of climate change mitigation, geoengineering—the technological management of weather patterns and carbon capture processes—occupies an especially politicized place. It has slowly ...

The Anthropocene Issue is a special series of short videos shot during the “Anthropocene Curriculum,” campus held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from November 14 to 22, 2014. The program brought together more than a 100 people from various disciplines around a series of workshops, presentations, and talks. It included, among many others, specialists in climatology, geography, law, history of science and technology, architecture, and art to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene. This special series presents the week-long gathering with a set of close-ups, interviews, group discussions, and informal conversations with some of its participants, launched over two ...

The Anthropocene Issue is a special series of short videos shot during the “Anthropocene Curriculum,” campus held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from November 14 to 22, 2014. The program brought together more than a 100 people from various disciplines around a series of workshops, presentations, and talks. It included, among many others, specialists in climatology, geography, law, history of science and technology, architecture, and art to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene. This special series presents the week-long gathering with a set of close-ups, interviews, group discussions, and informal conversations with some of its participants, launched over two ...

It is the summer of 2013. Inside an empty news studio, a teleprompter rolls messages on its screen narrating the events that led to the closing of the Greek public television network (ERT) as a consequence of the European crisis and its austerity-ridden economy. It reads: “ERT may have been the last television channel to ever broadcast, the first and last television signal to be interrupted.” With the shutdown, 2,700 ERT employees were sacked. ERT’s ending was broadcast live, and its last report was an image of the people that had gathered outside the station, protesting against its closure. At the ...

West Africa’s Guinea-Bissau declared unilaterally independence in 1973 and was recognized internationally in 1975 along with the other former Portuguese colonies. Luta ca caba inda (The Struggle Is Not Over Yet) is the title of a documentary film on the country’s post-independence left unfinished in 1980. Even in its fragmentary form, it is but one of several testimonies of a decade of militant cinema in the country, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism, between 1963 and 1974, and the subsequent nation-building. The remains of this period of politically-engaged cinema, including finished and unfinished Guinean films, audio recordings, and ...

For An Oil Free Future is a mini-series of protest videos against fossil fuel prospection and extraction (oil and natural gas) off the Portuguese coast (offshore) and in land (onshore) through fracking. Synopsis: In a dystopian future in which oil extraction has become a catastrophic reality in Portugal, a citizen-journalist looks back and questions how it was possible to go ahead with such plans. Over the last few years, and particularly in 2015 under the former PSD/CDS-PP right-wing government, several contracts were signed between the Portuguese State and major oil companies (Galp, Partex, Repsol, Eni, Australis, Cosmos and the controversial Portfuel). The matter ...

This episode, set within the context of inhabitants’ collaboration with Contour Biennale 8, weighs the fiction of allegorical images against the concept of the legal fictitious person. In particular, it puts in perspective the abstract body of Justice in relation to the status attributed to corporations for juridical purpose under the United States code of law. Set to the tone of feminist post-punk bands and composers, we draw on a recent US Supreme Court legal case that granted religious rights to a corporation called Hobby Lobby, which allowed it to deny its federal obligation to provide contraceptive healthcare to its female ...

“If you see something, film it.” Citizen-shot footage distributed through social media has galvanized social movements, in the demand for transparency and accountability. As a political tool, such videos have reverted surveillance against itself, proposing instead a record that comes from below; in other words, a type of vigilance led by citizens against power and abuse, in what has been called “sousveillance.” Yet, beyond our newsfeeds, how does citizen-shot video actually become evidence? How does it perform in the courtroom? Do most of these videos have legal value? Images that have truth-value in the court of public opinion may not in reality ...

Mining for Ringwoodite compares the 2014 geological discovery of “fossilized” water – termed Ringwoodite – found in the interior of a diamond in Brazil, with the prospects of mining on the moon or asteroids as announced by private companies in recent years. Ringwoodite, which holds water in the form of hydrogen and oxygen bound together, can only be found in the earth’s transition zone, between 410 and 660 kilometers below the earth’s surface. Until now, it had only been artificially created in laboratory or found in asteroid rocks. In the meantime, seismic wave analysis has suggested the presence of a ...

A map of contamination and poisoning by agrochemicals, chemical products such as herbicides and pesticides, in Brazil has finally been published. Since 2008, Brazil is the country that consumes the most agrochemicals in the world. In the period between 1999 and 2009, for example, around 62,000 cases of poisoning by agrochemicals were reported. If land expropriation and labor exploitation are the visible side of the violence associated with the agribusiness, poisoning is its invisible side. Geografia do Uso de Agrotóxicos no Brasil e Conexões com a União Europeia is a project coordinated by Larissa Mies Bombardi, geographer at the University of ...

inhabitants has commissioned Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil in order to host an urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and post-mortem justice. Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil (Ojibway), in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The case pitted the Umatilla people and other tribes, who wanted to provide a burial to the  “Ancient One,” against two scientists—one of which from the publicly-funded Smithsonian Institute—who wanted to study the “Kennewick Man.” In order for the ...

The Wages for Facebook manifesto appeared anonymously online in 2014. Its website consists of a single page with the manifesto written in bold letters scrolling automatically, denying visitors the ability to use the patented swipe gesture or the scrollbar. Wages for Facebook refers to a 1975 text “Wages Against Housework” by Silvia Federici, the feminist author and activist, which addressed the invisible role played by women’s affective labor as mothers, wives, and housewives (although not exclusively) in sustaining capitalism. In the same vein, Wages for Facebook demands that our time spent online, on social media platforms be recognized for what it ...