Rift Thinking

The Earth is Knot Flat is the material manifestation of Emma McNally thinking with those practicing kinship across a range of disciplines including poetry, philosophy, physics and urban geography.  Sharing a practice of opening speculative spaces, Emma and Kathryn will talk about their interest in breaking down separations of categories and disciplines and challenging hierarchic structures in a bid to do things differently towards more equitable ways of being.

The conversation will reveal alliances between the artist and the geographer through references to Emma’s installation and Kathryn’s latest book, Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race. It will be structured around ten words drawn from Etymologies of Foam and Dust, a book that accompanies the exhibition.

Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London, Kathryn Yusoff understands the inhuman as a place from which to think about earthly relations and inhumane histories. Yusoff engages historical, geophilosophical and black feminist methods to speak to issues of environmental change, empires of geologic practices and the politics of planetary states. Their interest is in the role of inhuman epistemologies in race, gender, and subjectivity for more equitable environmental world-building.

Unground the human, fall off its edges

into rocky gatherings, seismic rifts, and

world-altering

geologic grammars;

Brake geo-logics

of enclosure:

alluvial plantations, oceanic, magma, mine, Mine, mine

fungible units, black-gold,

coiled and recoiling earth,

Of inhumanities.

– from Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race