Red Earth & Planetary Portals: Book Launch & Performance
!! Friday 8 December @ Peckham Levels, 5 Floor, 95A Rye Lane, SE15 4ST, London !!
A reading of Red Earth by Michael Salu + a performance of Diamond Power by the Planetary Portals Collective with film by Michael Salu
Red Earth: Conversing with Dante, Yoruba metaphysics and probabilistic computation, Red Earth is an expansive text and the source material for Michael Salu’s broader interdisciplinary artistic study, where machine learning is central to various processes to ask whether computational translation can be used to engage alternative cosmologies.
Planetary Portals examines these colonial afterlives of extractive industries in southern Africa, drawing attention to their social and environmental costs across the continent. We investigate how colonial dreams of Empire have been and still are sustained through 'changes of states' exemplified in today’s mining of rare earth elements (REEs) and their transformation into the digital data infrastructures of techno-utopian futures. Colonialism is an ongoing material present that requires counterpoetics, which challenge its planetary passage and modes of affective and material reproduction.
6pm Diabolical drinks
7pm R eading and performance
9 pm Diamond Disco with Kyprian
...t ill late
Planetary Portals is an interdisciplinary research collective of Michael Salu, Kerry Holden, Casper Laing Ebbensgaard and Kathryn Yusoff which examines the colonial afterlives of extractive industries in southern Africa, drawing attention to their social and environmental costs across the continent.
Michael Salu is a British-born Nigerian writer, artist, filmmaker, editor and creative strategist with an interdisciplinary practice. He runs House of Thought, an artistic research practice and is part of the Planetary Portals Collective