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  • Caring for the dead: The afterlives of collective bodies

Pereira, Godofredo, 2020, Book Section, Caring for the dead: The afterlives of collective bodies In: Lahoud, Adrian and Andrea, Bagnato, (eds.) Rights of Future Generations: Conditions. Hatje Cantz, Sharjah, pp. 36-40. ISBN 978-3775747035

Abstract or Description:

The European colonial expansion marks the beginning of a death drive for underground resources. That its consequences are felt today in the form of global warming and other metabolic rifts is not a surprise. In the sixteenth century alone, this led to the death of 60 million indigenous peoples in the Americas, a mass genocide with global environmental impacts. In this context, I have been investigating a series of exhumations, with a focus on Latin America, while thinking about the practice of environmental architecture. Exhumations—the removal of bodies from the ground so as to reveal or to give light—are a key to understanding resource extraction and its geological optics. However, in recent decades, exhumations have gained further prominence by supporting indigenous demands for the protection and restitution of ancestral territories; within the prosecution of human rights violations, owing to the development of forensic practices; or due to the new importance given to soil and material analysis within disputes on environmental justice. Located at the intersection of extraction and the resistance to it, exhumations are a crucial feature of how territorial, environmental, and political disputes are conducted. I am especially interested in how exhumations foreground political communities constituted in relation to grounds and territories, often in the form of complex intergenerational relations, extended kinship structures, or political alliances that cut across epistemic divides. The range of projects and communities that exhumations capture is, of course, extremely wide, but in the context of a discussion on the rights of future generations and architecture, two dimensions of exhumation are particularly important: the cultivation of intertemporal modes of coexistence and of kinfullness.

Subjects: Architecture > K300 Landscape Design > K320 Landscape studies
School or Centre: School of Architecture
Date Deposited: 13 Nov 2020 16:55
Last Modified: 18 Nov 2020 11:33
URI: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/4560
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