Ben Eastham talks with authors Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams about their novel, Diego Garcia (Fitzcarraldo Editions, Semiotext(e) / Native Agents).

"Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home. We see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home." –Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood

About the book:

August 2014. Two friends, writers Damaris Caleemootoo and Oliver Pablo Herzberg, arrive in Edinburgh from London, the city that killed Daniel—his brother, her frenemy and loved by them both. Every day is different but the same. Trying to get to the library, they get distracted by bickering—will it rain or not and what should they do about their tanking bitcoin?—in the end failing to write or resist the sadness which follows them as they drift around the city.

On such a day they meet Diego, a poet. They learn that Diego's mother was from the Chagos Archipelago, that she and her community were forced to leave their ancestral islands by soldiers in 1973 to make way for a military base. They become obsessed with this notorious episode in British history and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and feel urged to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell?

Natasha Soobramanien is based in Brussels. She is a writing tutor on the Lens-Based Media Masters Programme at Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

Luke Williams is based in Cove, west Scotland. He teaches creative and critical writing at Birkbeck University of London.

More information on the Chagos Refugees Group can be found at thechagosrefugeesgroup.com.

Hallie Ayres talks to Miriam Hillawi Abraham and Nasra Abdullahi about their text, "The Afro-Cosmologist's Treatise on the Astrolabe," published in the Cosmic Bulletin 2021.

Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, she works with digital media and spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism and intersectionality. She holds an MFA in Interaction Design from the California College of the Arts and a BArch in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art. She is a CCA-Mellon researcher for the Digital Now multidisciplinary project, a 2020 fellow of Gray Area's Zachary Watson Education Fund and a Graham Foundation 2020 grantee.

Nasra Abdullahi is a designer, writer, and editor based in London. She is currently a junior writer at Wallpaper* magazine, the 2021 guest editor of The Avery Review and a member of the second cohort of New Architecture Writers. A student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, she is interested in ways we can seek equitable futures through material cultures away from projected architectural and urban desires. Seeking a multiplicity in spatial practice, she is interested in what modern architectural technology can look like when innovated and reappropriated through and in relation with various knowledge systems. Currently her work is centered around exploring the possibilities of using analytical tools from black and indigenous radical traditions to inform us about design and technological practice.

Andreas Petrossiants discusses We Are "Nature" Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (Pluto Press/Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 2021) with authors Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan. An excerpt from the book was published in e-flux journal issue 124.

"Since 2004, through the work of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, we have questioned how to radically transform and entangle art, activism, and everyday life amidst the horrors of the Capitalocene. A decade ago, we deserted our metropolitan London lives, rooting our art activism in a place that French politicians had declared "lost to the republic," known by those who inhabited it as la ZAD (the "zone to defend"). On these four thousand acres of wetlands, turned into a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, an international airport project was defeated through disobedience and occupation. This is an extract from our latest book, where an art of life is populated by rebel farmers and salamanders, barricades and bakeries, riots and rituals."

—Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan

Isabelle Fremeaux is an educator and action researcher. She was formerly Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London.

Jay Jordan is an art activist and author, cofounder of Reclaim the Streets and the Clandestine Insurgent Clown Army.

Hallie Ayres talks with Shimrit Lee about her forthcoming book, Decolonize Museums.

Shimrit Lee is a writer, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit's research interests relate to the cultural production of security narratives in Israel and the US. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, and currently teaches high school history as well as community-based adult education at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her book, Decolonize Museums, will be published as part of the series "Decolonize That" by Warscapes and O/R Books in 2021.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 9: Lubricating. With two independent sound pieces by artists Tabita Rezaire and Yin Aiwen Smoothness drives contemporary technological regimes: frictionless experiences, immediate gratifications, a promise of a world of flows without disruption. We are enchanted by a slippery seamlessness, mediated by sleek surfaces. A visual order accommodating the idea that the world, and capital, run painlessly. An order enabling control over collective imaginations, bodies, and natural resources. One that oils the relentless infrastructural libido.

Tabita Rezaire sends her blessings and wishes for a New Moon day. A new life cycle. An opportunity to create anew. A time for identity seeking and becoming a seeker of the depths of existence. The New Moon meddles to remind us that the possibilities for change are infinite.

Aiwen Yin is member of the ReUnion Network collective, a group of people operating from different modes of engagement to both promote and speculate with non-familiar forms of kinship. In Yin's words, support, mutual care, grief, healing, and affection are not exclusively allocated among blood-related beings, but instead become a fundamental feature of human associability and of social-making at large. Aligned with ReUnion Network's engagement with the daily formation of social bonding, Aiwen Yin imagines her practice as providing a frame where non-normative forms of inclusivity can be nurtured.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 8: Discharging. With a sound piece by researchers and designers Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Marco Ferrari, and Elise Hunchuck (in collaboration) Rainmaking is a long-lasting human dream. Triggering water precipitation in air to combat water scarcity, drought, and global warming has driven spiritual cultural practices, scientific studies, and territorial conflicts. It has materialized in countless ceremonies, rituals, and other technologically enabled practices. Human ambition to tame the environment drives the proliferation of contemporary cloud seeding programs, which speaks about the political, ecological, and social consequences of the extraction of what is common.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Marco Ferrari, and Elise Hunchuck talk about Sky River, a project supported by the Chinese government to work on the watershed of the Huang He (Yellow River) through weather engineering and aimed at mitigating the territory's increasing drought conditions. Articulating a new planetary and atmospheric imaginary, Sky River positions the water that circulates in the upper atmosphere not as a natural occurrence but as an asset that can be secured through infrastructure. Precipitation is, in this context, a readily available water source that could be managed through a distributed network of cloud-seeding devices, while the tracking of weather patterns can be done via sophisticated remote-sensing technologies.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 7: Clogging. With two independent sound pieces by artists Vera Frenkel and Ibiye CampMaterial power resides in the containment and control of flows. Far from avoiding friction, it is precisely the disruptions and systemic imbalances in flow itself that keeps the system running and allows for uneven forms of distribution, accumulation, and advantage. Latency, clogging, inertia, and slowness are instruments to both enact and challenge power.

When artist Vera Frenkel was working on A Challenging Word and a Prescient Work, her sound piece, she heard the unexpected news that a neighbourhood "developer" was demanding that her city cancel its heritage by-law in order to give space for redevelopment, threatening to force her out of her home and studio. Under these painful circumstances, Frenkel wrote a letter to Andrés Jaque, in which she reflected on how neoliberal approaches to hydrocommons, such as Toronto's coastal line, have manifested polarized economic, social, and political divides. Since the 1980s, and accelerated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism operates through the redevelopment of cities' waterfronts, disarticulating through violence the social, architectural, ecological, and productive practices and associations that historically grew there. These waterfronts become sites for money placement, tax evasion, and capital laundering. Citizens who live in these areas encounter segregation, victimhood, and vulnerability. Frenkel's monumental work ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive traces the grief that late neoliberalism and architectural complicity produce in citizens dispossessed of visual and physical access to water. In this related sound piece, Frenkel ultimately reflects on how an economic system that claims universal dynamization operates, in fact, by dispossessing citizens of their mobility and communal relationships.

Ibiye Camp uses Injiri fabric to reflect on how automation forcefully transforms our bodies. Injiri has its origins in another fabric, the Madras, which circulated through the world during the transatlantic slave trade. In Buguma, Nigeria, where part of Ibiye's family is from, Kalabari craftwomen recondition and re-imagine the cloth by cutting and removing threads to reveal new patterns. The resulting Injiri fabric is worn as wrappers in Kalabari ceremonies. In recent years, the pulled cloth is no longer made by Kalabari women, but by factory machines in China. The female creative position has been displaced by machines, triggering a shift in social roles and spaces in Buguma. In Ibiye's piece we hear the sound of Kalabari drums communicating stories of goddesses, gods, and spiritual beings. We also hear the traces and ghostly presences resulting from this transformation in the manufacturing process.

You will first hear a letter from Vera Frenkel to Chief Curator Andrés Jaque. This is the full letter, replacing any previous version. It is followed by a sound piece on the same word by Ibiye Camp.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 6. Transfusing: With three sound pieces by scholar Iván L. Munuera and artists P. Staff and Himali Singh Soin Bodies are permeable. They exist in continuous fluid exchange with other bodies. Yet fluids circulate differently than the bodies to which they once belonged. They pass from one body to another body, merging stories, fates, futures. They fuse health, life, or their opposite. Fluids replace components; they add something that is lacking or is desired. Fluids are given, passed onto, injected, poured, infiltrated in a sometimes unavowed hydro commons.

Iván L. Munuera talks about blood transfusion. Blood transfusion carries a notion of "body" far from the definition of a discrete and autonomous being. It states an environmental recomposition that pushes for interdependent, interconnected, and not zipped-up embodiments.

In their work, P. Staff interrogates the often uncomfortable interdependency and extraction of bio-commodities, both human and other, between body and institution, liquid, and solid. The material dimension of collective life becomes the site where structural violence, registers of harm, and the corrosive effects of acid, blood, and hormones can be explored and enacted.

Himali Singh Soin explores the elements of the earth, their reverberations in the body and the inter-scalar exchanges between them. Here she tells the story of a search for a lost bla, a subtle life force that runs through the world-body that has lost itself amid the crisis of the present moment.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 5. Melting: With two sound pieces by the artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun (in collaboration) and Michael Wang It is precisely at the melting point of a pure substance that solid and liquid forms coexist and produce each other. Glaciers and seas. Mountains and rivers. Molten rocks, soils, and climates. Entire worlds—several hundred to several thousand years old—melt into other worlds, making unexpected currents, struggles, and living conditions emerge.

Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun reflect on the impact that local policies and post-disaster reconstruction plans had in the Minjiang River after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and the way they were mitigated and responded to by local traditions, ancient wisdom, and more-than-human intelligences.

Michael Wang's sound piece is attuned to the complex territorial entanglements that connect Shanghai to the melting glaciers of the Tibetan plateau and to the course of the Yangtze River. Ultimately, this work interrogates the power and intrinsic violence of reversibility.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll with the sound design of Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 4. Breathing: Torkwase Dyson and Itziar OkarizSeemingly a banal act of taking air into the lungs and releasing it, breathing connects bodies to other bodies and bodies to the atmosphere. In breathing, bodies enact their existence and their interdependence across territories and identities. Yet breathing is too often unequally distributed, and the deprivation of air itself reminds us of the contentious, violent relations dictating the right to life.

Torkwase Dyson interrogates the violence contained in the way human bodies emerge through the infrastructures outside of them, and the forms of resistance and invented freedom enacted in the circulation, affirmation, and dissolution of bodies into the material exteriority they are to be part of.

Itziar Okariz focuses attention on breath understood as a zero degree of identity; and on how air enters and leaves the bodies, the flesh, and the fluids that compose them and their relationship with the atmosphere. Relations of fragility and interdependence.