In Louisiana, the fossil fuel industry maintains the spatial, environmental, and economic logic of colonialism and slavery. Oil and gas corporations have laid over 50,000 miles of pipeline and dredged 10,000 miles of canals to drill and access 75,000 wells throughout the state’s coastal wetlands, eroding our ecosystem at one of the fastest rates in the world and disintegrating a critical buffer between human communities and the hurricanes and rising seas of the Gulf. Louisiana’s frontline communities also share property lines with some of the nation’s most polluting petrochemical plants, which occupy the footprints of fallow sugarcane plantations. This ecological violence against entangled communities of humans and nonhumans is the ‘great work’ of a 500-year-old cultural cosmology called “Extractivism.” Can a practice of revealing the multidimensional violence of Extractivism cultivate the cognitive and discursive conditions for accountability? This project is a major attempt to disentangle the snarl of fossil fuel infrastructure in Louisiana.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and researcher from New Orleans, LA. Her work investigates extractive environmental and economic practices to expose the violence and resistance that comprise the foundations of U.S. and Louisiana societies. Brown is a member of Occupy Museums, was a co-founder of Blights Out, and is the founder of New Orleans’ Fossil Free Festival (FFF). FFF celebrates the foreseeable end of the Fossil Fuel Era and frames public space to imagine and design a fossil fuel-free future with art, music, food and conversations about the ethical entrapments of fossil fuel philanthropy.