Transcript
An Earth Being Platform

Earth, I feel you in all of your intensities. The trickle of frozen liquid. Your searing winds in thirsty and luminous deserts. Tadpoles tangled in the sublime muck of a life worth living. I sense you, in both your erotic power, and all of our ghastly transformations. The rising magnitude of toxicity laced within tentacles of new growth. The swirl of plastic. The painful felling caused by chainsaw teeth that make you bleed. And, still you give and offer more. In return what do you ask, of me, of us? 

If we cultivated you, would your weariness be gone? Have we exhausted you to the point of no future, as we exhaust ourselves looking for life within the machine? There is too much human and more-than-human suffering. I shudder at the current pace of diminishment. The stewards never to be born. The disappeared and the obliterated never to be hatched. And, yet I feel it within me, within us, to search for something quiet, a kind of pause, a space for the emergent, and perhaps for the unknown.

And most of all I feel the gravity of this question: How do we counter the paradigm of war and death that is at the heart of the colonial Anthropocene? The Great Acceleration, the time-sense of no future. Can we rest knowing that the gradient of this misalignment grinds on?

We have no time for patience. The oceans and solid ground are one and the same. We are taught that these are separate, but this is one plane of existence that feeds all life. Terra planeta. Mar planeta. You are one and we speak with you. The counter-army that thinks with you. We remember our history. The submerged who hold you. The war is not coming, but here and has been here, for at least six centuries. It gets louder, more voracious in new ways, its depletion intensifies, its accumulative forces wreak havoc upon our bodies and upon yours. There is no separation.

And like you, we find new sources of corporal energies once put into sugarcane and oil extraction. The once-fodder of the capitalist machine, we delink and find each other. And then and now we rise. In the roots and in the crevices of the sea and river edges to create the source material for a counter war. Not reform, but a radical restructuring. We envision, a timeless and a historical future. We bury, our seen and unseen dead. We mourn, all of our losses. We catalogue, our human and more-than-human martyrs in the war against you, Earth. We perceive the destruction and do everything possible to stop more. We do this to inhabit you anew, to be with and become more a part of you, rather than pillage and objectify. Yet is there time?

Earth, Madre Tierra, I could never be your spokesperson or your President. I wouldn’t want to be that singular voice that echoes indoors and in hollowed-out chambers. Or the singular optic that maps you to subjugate. Instead I offer my respect, respite, the potential of enlivened dreams. The density of emergent canopies, the freedom of your auto-poesis. In the waves of lunar pulls, the vibration of our otherwise emerges.

What I offer you, querida and heterogeneous Earth Being, is my capacity for queer language and relations, my scarred body that like yours is a femme conduit. I am part of your multispecies chorus, one of a plural and horizontal council. I want to sing and dance for you as a multiple being, to flee the carbon-induced carceral state.

There exist roadmaps for how we can do this: how to counter legislate out of the entanglement of racial and genocidal histories. The demand for accountability and retribution, the call to end terracidio by Mapuche women in the BioBío. All of these gorgeous, sonorous demands, bringing us closer to what we might call deep and radical Earth-centered democracies.

So many fractures and fissions beat us down. And it is sometimes hard to remember: How the fuck do we move forward? How to feel our solidarity with you? How do we stand with each other on your behalf? If you are the comandante, I am your sub. Submerged in your waters, wading into and subsumed by your forces. Your rivers, mountains, creature worlds cross borders, and so must I as a queer decolonial femme, grain of the We.

Querida Earth, let me dwell in your land memory. Let us swirl into your murky waters. Let me be like an oyster that purifies the river in a billion forms. To dismantle the paradigm of war against you, querida Pacha Mama.

We dissolve, we proliferate, and remake. We subsume to give way to you once more.

“We envision a timeless and a historical future. We bury our seen and unseen dead. We mourn all of our losses. We catalogue our human and more-than-human martyrs in the war against you, Earth.”

In an intimate letter to Earth, Madre Tierra, Pachamama, Gómez-Barris mourns the colonial and capitalist-induced harms to the planet, while steeling our resolve for fierce resistance to ecocide. Rooted in the queer, decolonial, and more-than-human perspectives that animate her work, Gómez-Barris calls for earthly and embodied activist practices.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a scholar and writer who works at the intersections of the built environment, decolonization, visual arts, memory, land, and sea restitution. She is the author of four books: Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), and Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010, with Herman Gray). She is completing a new book on what she terms the colonial Anthropocene, At the Sea’s Edge: Liquid Ontologies Beyond Colonial Extinction (Forthcoming, Duke University Press). She is a series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts, Duke University Press. Macarena is also the Founding Director of the Global South Center and the Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award, the 2020-2021 Pratt Research Award, and the 2020-2021 Graduate Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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