Talks

Gas Imaginary Talks #1
Rachel O’Reilly in conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva

November 26, 2020

Rachel O’Reilly and Denise Ferreira da Silva have 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.

Participant Bios

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.

is an artist, writer/poet, curator and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture. She teaches the theory seminar ‘At the Limits of the Writerly’ on planetarity, political economy and poetics at the Dutch Art Institute. She was previously a curator at the Australian Cinematheque at the Gallery of Modern Art | Australian Cinematheque, Brisbane, and researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy.

Her artistic work and research have been presented internationally, most recently at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; E-flux, New York; and UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Recent curatorial collaborations include Ex-Embassy with Sonja Hornung and Planetary Records: Performing Justice between Art and Law with Natasha Ginwala. She co-wrote On Neutrality with Jelena Vesic and Vlidi Jeric for the Non-Aligned Modernisms series (MCA, Belgrade), publishes with Danny Butt on artistic autonomy in settler colonial space, and currently coedits Feminist Takes on Black Wave Film with Antonia Majaca and Jelena Vesic for Sternberg Press.

Gas Imaginary Talks #1 Documentation