Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Amistad Research Center Present: A Conversation with Imani Jacqueline Brown and Zoé Samudzi

Imani Jacqueline Brown, still from *The holes in the earth mirror the holes in our souls (and from them we can grow trees), or, This work is not sponsored by Nova Chemicals (but others at Carnegie Museum of Art are)*, 2023. Video projection. Dimensions variable. Produced with the support of Visualizing Abolition at UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Flights courtesy of Healthy Gulf and South Wings.

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, together with our partner the Amistad Research Center, invite you to join us for a conversation with Amistad-Rivers Research Resident Imani Jacqueline Brown and the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor of Genocide Studies and Prevention Zoé Samudzi, on Thursday, October 10, 2024, at the Marigny Opera House.

This conversation brings Brown and Samudzi together to discuss their individual practices as artists and scholars engaged with the transnational politics of extraction and the role of land, emissions, and climate catastrophe in emancipatory efforts to rehabilitate and return sites, communities, and resources. Samudzi’s work engages the continuing afterlives of genocide, imperialism, and colonialism, and takes up visual images and objects as a way of addressing the sticky politics of seeing, witnessing, and the spatialities of violence.

We hope you will join us to learn more about Brown and Samudzi’s practices, the historical and political frameworks that connect them, and the work that collaboration makes possible.

Location:
The Marigny Opera House
725 St. Ferdinand Street
New Orleans, LA 70117

Doors open at 6:00pm, the conversation will begin promptly at 6:30pm.
To R.S.V.P., please visit our Eventbrite page.
Attendance is free and open to the public.

Dr. Zoé Samudzi is the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor of Genocide Studies and Genocide Prevention at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, MA. She holds a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She is also a Research Associate with the Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg, and she was a Curatorial Research Fellowship with the Cross-Collections Research Department at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Samudzi is a writer, critic, and is currently Associate Editor with Parapraxis Magazine. Her work has appeared in Art in America, Bookforum, The New Inquiry, The Architectural Review, The New Republic, The Funambulist, and elsewhere. Samudzi co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation, published by AK Press and is represented by Alison Lewis at the Francis Goldin Literary Agency.

Imani Jacqueline Brown (b. 1988) is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans, Louisiana, now based in London. Her work investigates extractive environmental and economic systems (from colonial genocide and slavery to contemporary fossil fuel production), as well as police and corporate impunity, to expose the layers of violence and resistance that comprise the foundations of settler-colonial society. In addition to her role at Forensic Architecture, Brown is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London, as well as an Associate Lecturer in MA Architecture at the Royal College of Arts. She received her MA with distinction from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019.