Haunting Material Matters: Plastic | Kim Darbouze

This episode of 'Haunting Material Matters: Plastic Dead Living things' focuses on the multilayered entanglements of colonial erosion that transform lands, bodies, ecologies, geographies, and species into plastic dead living things.

In this episode, I focus on Indonesia and the book review I did for 'In the Shadow of the palms' by Sophie Chao. This book greatly compliments my ongoing research, and it is a great read!

I will discuss how the continued cost of colonial capital gains turns us into zombies/plastic dead living things presently depicted in our entangled collective chaos. How can we collectively break out of the programming that keeps us divided in illusions that this is not a global issue? Is a little bit of capital gains worth the decades of colonial pain? In this talk, I invite us to see colonialism beyond a past matter of land theft.

Colonialism continues to shape-shift, especially technologically. Now we can look away at the push of a button. However, our present reality shows us that 'we can't keep running away', as the pharcyde reminds us. Aren't we tired of repeating the same things in different ways? What about creating futures that allow us to collectively shed and break away from colonial iterations?

Ps. The artwork is also part of my artistic research. Everything is hand-crafted. This unique piece holds codes of the ties between Indonesia and Suriname.