Skip to Primary Menu Skip to Utility Menu Skip to Main Content Skip to Footer
UC Santa Cruz Logo Institute of the Arts and Sciences
UC Santa Cruz Logo
Photo/Video Caption: Caption

Past Exhibition

Extraction Conference

May 12 - May 13, 2017

EXTRACTION designates capitalism’s fundamental logic of withdrawal—of value, nutrients, energy, labor, time—from people, lands, culture, life-forms, and the elements. It signals that these withdrawals are made without corresponding deposits except in the form of pollution, waste, climate change, illness, and death, which are unequally distributed along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Extraction, therefore, determines the conditions of living and dying in the era of fossil fuel capitalism and catastrophic climate change.

Location

College 9/10 Multipurpose Room,
Resource Center for NonViolence

Conference Dates

Friday, May 12, 2017 to Saturday, May 13, 2017

A group of people hold a protest banner that reads: We are here to protect water.

About the Exhibit

Over the course of two days, an influential and diverse group of thinkers, artists, and activists will give presentations, screen artworks and films, and lead discussions that raise questions about how this politics of disaster is being visualized, negotiated, and contested, in places as far-ranging and interconnected as British Columbia, North Dakota, Chicago, and California. They will consider the roles cultural producers such as socially engaged artists, anti-colonial legal activists, Indigenous water protectors, media theorists, writers, architects, and designers play in envisioning and negating extractive politics and policies.

Sponsorships

The Extraction Conference is sponsored generously by the Arts Division, the Center for Creative Ecologies, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz Arts Division, the Center for Documentary Arts and Research, the UC Santa Cruz Arts Research Institute, Colleges Nine and Ten, and the UCSC American Indian Resource Center.

Admission Information (Tab to skip section.)
A petrol refinery is being constructed among hills.

Schedule

Introduction: Laurie Palmer and T.J. Demos

Jason W. Moore
Binghamton University, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, 2015 

Angela Melitopoulos and Angela Anderson
EU-based research artists, on gold mining in the Northern Greece

Anne Quirynen
Berlin-based artist, on extraction and speculative fabulation

Claire Pentecost
Chicago-based artist investigating petcoke, tracing dirty energy

Screening of Fractured Land (2015)
Introduction by Caleb Behn

Saturday May 13, 10 am- 4:30pm
Resource Center for Nonviolence, 612 Ocean Street, Santa Cruz

Caleb Behn (Eh-Cho Dene and Dunne Za/Cree)
Indigenous legal activism against extraction in British Columbia

Wašté Win Young (Wichiyena Dakota and Hunkpapa Lakota)
Speaking on the Standing Rock Indigenous resistance movement

Brian Holmes
Chicago-based artist speaking on Petropolis, US fossil-fuel infrastructure

Isabelle Carbonell
UCSC-based filmmaker addressing Bento Rodrigues dam disaster in Brazil

Mary Hsia-Coron and Andy Hsia-Coron
Anti-fracking activists, San Benito County

Ann López
Center for Farmworkers Families, Watsonville

This conference is organized by T.J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies and A. Laurie Palmer, with Rachel Nelson of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and Chessa Adsit-Morris.