Un-Earthing Extractive Architectures

In the opening of Theo Cuthand’s provocative fifteen-minute film Extractions (20121) they remark upon the inevitable entanglements between the earth’s plundering and the corporate funding of the arts. Over a close shot of a moving freight train, the prototypical symbol of modernity, they say, “Someone asked me recently if there is any type of funding that I wouldn’t accept to make art and I said resource extraction. But then, while lying in bed, I realized I already had.”  

Extractions is organized around archival footage of uranium mining and its blasted landscape upon Northern Saskatchewan territory in the Atthabasca Basin of Canada. It is grounded in an Indigi-queer and trans perspective that visualizes how uranium is mined for nuclear power on a global scale. But the film’s visual language does not remain at the mega level of abstraction, or the dominant scale of the extractive view. Instead, through discussion of IVF, egg harvesting, and the instabilities and chemical mutations of the trans-body, the film offers a more intimate and personal take of what it means to live in the neocolonial era of ongoing land exploitation within the Western meta narrative of liberal notions of progress. It also situates the complexity of Indigenous trans-masculine personhood and its complex relationalities, strategies, and negotiations with the settler colonial world. 

At the end of the opening scene, Cuthand explains how they too are implicated in the extractive matrix of power, stating that as an undergraduate they received a scholarship from an organization funded by a resource extraction company. By pointing to the pervasiveness of their, and by extension our, creative and intellectual entanglement with extractive industries, a profound level of reckoning with the extractive beast in our midst comes available. Indeed, the persistent critique of nuclear modernity and settler colonialism that unveils the complex scales of entanglement with land occupation and the carbon and nuclear economy is an important dimension of what Cuthand and other Indigenous filmmakers offer. 

Two questions guide my inquiry in this essay: How are our creative and intellectual productions caught within the impossible to avoid present nexus of late racial capitalism? How can unearthing the architectures of extraction make visible the submerged capitalist relations and their inescapably close relation with our generalized polluted condition?

In my own work, I have written extensively on extractive zones in the global south and upon Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous territories documenting how mining, hydroelectricity, monoculture forest plantations, fossil fuel exploration, and forms of new age, eco and commercial tourism amount to a devastating war against the earth and its racialized peoples. In this short reflection, I also contend with how the funneling of profits from resource extraction into the museum and art cultural industries as well as within digital economies is central to uncovering the submerged capitalist relations and their inevitably close connections to the more generalized polluted condition. I show how we must unearth these architectures to contend with the accumulation, dispossessions, and degradations of extractive capitalism in order to give space to the delicate and resilient worlds of the otherwise, by developing alternative models for a livable planet.  

Unearthing architectures is a vital way to piece through the colonial Anthropocene by unveiling an urban model in ruins and dependent upon death and destruction

If architecture has been defined as the art and technique of design and building, then unearthing architectures is the decolonial analytical and activist practice that aims to uncover the financialization of culture, art, and the built environment as the long durée outcome of colonial and neocolonial plunder, profit accumulation, and reinvestment. 

Unearthing architectures is a vital way to piece through the colonial Anthropocene by unveiling an urban model in ruins and dependent upon death and destruction here and elsewhere. Unlike the bulldozer or the military tank (guanaco), this decolonial critical method reaches into the under lands to see how extractive cultural industries are imbricated with unjust wealth and cultural capital accumulation by a billionaire class. Such a practice demands that extractive corporate entities be accountable for their art-washing monoculture. It also offers a way to dig up and lay bare the infrastructures that have contributed to a toxic world, gravely in need of rebalance, redress, repair, and thinking with and beyond extractive capitalism.

I began this counter form of excavation and documentation in my books, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas. Later, I refined this method by watching and learning from Latin American trans*feminists in the struggle against the heteropatriarchal state as well as by witnessing the successful campaign by Decolonize This Place (that learned from the Palestinian resistance and Standing Rock Sioux activisms). The latter campaign eventually led to the conditions that forced billionaire Warren Kanders to step down from the Whitney Board of Trustees. One focus of the Whitney campaign was to make visible how the weapons companies owned by Kanders, Safariland and Defense Technology,  produced cannisters and smoke grenades used against migrants at the southern end of the US border. Though Kanders had promised to divest from such industries, his ongoing investments in the military industrial complex continued to accrue gigantic profits for a US and global economy based on war manufacturing, or what the late Kanaka Maoli Native feminist scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask called mili-capitalism. 

The campaign by Whitney No More referenced the Idle No More movement and generatively exposed the relations between this legendary cultural institution, its position upon Lenapehoking territory, and the violence unleashed against dispossessed migrants crossing the Southern border. Within the current right wing infused political climate that continues to criminalize immigrants to reimagine the crumbling nation, it’s important to remember that these forced migrations are not homogenous groups. Migrants include Mestizx and Indigenous peoples of all genders and nations, including from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Mixtec, Nahuatal, Mayan-Quiche territories as well as dozens of other Indigenous occupied nations. And, many migrants either experienced US Empire directly or their personhoods, livelihoods, and geographies have been haunted by the afterlives of American intervention.

Extractive cultural industries are imbricated with unjust wealth and cultural capital accumulation by a billionaire class

Given the range of toxic conditions that military, racial, and extractive capitalism have produced, including failing infrastructures, the planetary climate crisis, biodiverse and cultural theft, and the chemical effects of carbon offset, the museum strike has become an important node of emergent political activity. It is a place from which to unbuild, reimagine, denounce and redirect resources. In Turtle Island as throughout Abya Ayala, the Indigenous nomenclature for the Américas, the museum has become an increasingly important memory symbolic, a way to make abstract capitalist relations visible. As Kirsty Robinson discussed in the wake of the important social movement Idle No More, growing protest cultures challenged historical colonial relations and their new entanglements by striking the museum and thereby exposing the underbelly of broader economic, political and cultural neoliberal economies. 

Given the range of toxic conditions that military, racial, and extractive capitalism have produced, the museum strike has become an important node of emergent political activity

Cultural institutions such as museums, art and film collections, as well as media conglomerates, are primary sites of capitalism’s primitive accumulation and must be unbuilt or rethought in ways that address these legacies. As artists, thinkers, knowledge makers, activists, educators, and cultural producers, de-cathecting with the dominant model of colonial museum and art industries allows for generative sources of creativity that do not continuously contribute to extractive capitalism. 

Cuthand’s opening reflection and provocation in Extractions “I realized I already had,” is an important refrain for our present moment when we are bound to the architectures of extraction. In this piece, I attend to these thorny questions by addressing the history of dirty funding in relation to art and cultural institutions in the US and their entanglement with broader empires.

The museum has become an increasingly important memory symbolic, a way to make abstract capitalist relations visible

Petroleum monopolies and their wealth transfers are not a sideline to the story of modernity, but like mining, are one of its main protagonists. The oil barons of the nineteenth century were known for their ruthless capitalist practices, some of whom later switched their investments into gold and mineral extraction. The American oil industry, including Standard Oil, Chevron, and Exxon was built upon black gold, below the surface fossil energy that continues to power economic dependency for many Latin American, Arab, Asian, and global south nations. 

The great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano rendered these capitalist relations visible in his classic discussion of the “resource burden.”

No other magnet attracts foreign capital as much as black gold… Petroleum is the wealth most monopolized in the entire capitalist system.  There are no companies that enjoy the political power that the great petroleum corporations exercise on a universal scale. 

Standard Oil and Shell lift up and dethrone kings and presidents; they finance palace conspiracies and coups d’état; and they dispose of innumerable generals and ministers; and in all regions and languages, they decide the course of war and peace… The natural wealth of Venezuela and other Latin American countries with petroleum in the subsoil, objects of assaults and organized plundering, has been converted into the principal instrument of their political servitude and social degradation. This is a long history of exploits and of curses, infamies, and defiance.

Within the subsoil of museum and art collections is a long history of exploits and plundering, where oil, hydroelectric damming, investments in carceral industries, and militarization link the owning class to the condemnation of resource rich regions of the world. This is what Galeano refers to when he described the plundering and converting of the earth’s subsoils into “the principal instrument of their political servitude and social degradation.” Within the underlands of world-class museums lies the curse of resource wars, the below the surface deposits that have historically given rise to militarism as a form of external and state control over finite natural resources. 

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, US military forays in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Global South, deadened living ecologies in order to acquire primary materials, wreaking havoc on national political autonomy, Indigenous sovereignty, and inter-American political solidarity. The war architecture and the trail of death in its wake, was then conveyed as the “bright future” narrative of the US petrol expansionist imaginary.  

For instance, Greg Grandin’s classic book shows how Henry Ford’s modern colonial adventures were rationalized through his rubber dreams emanated from the Amazonian Basin and then extended across the hemisphere, interconnecting the oil economy to the rubber boom, and to the Americanization of the world’s largest biodiverse region. Another instance, of extractive interventionism was the understudied but pivotal Chaco War from 1932-1935. Standard Oil’s competition with Shell Oil in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Venezuela produced the conflict between nations that led to the socially and environmentally catastrophic war between Bolivia and Paraguay. As just one example of interventionist corporatism, this unnecessary war was fueled by Rockefeller’s greed in ways that impoverished both nations with lasting consequences for the entire Latin American region.

One cannot overstate how the world’s largest and most powerful art collections are also implicated in resource extraction. Both John D. Rockefeller and Paul Getty funneled their profiteering from petroleum into art collections, creating the foundation of major US cultural institutions. Guggenheim made most of his profits from silver mining and smelting in Colorado. One of MoMA’s original art patrons, John D. Rockefeller, built his fortune from investments from oil wells in Pennsylvania and Ohio in nineteenth century. 

It is important to mention the gendered implications of these imperial histories of extractivism, war, and architecture that are then returned as liberal philanthropic motives to establish cultural institutions. Empires are forcefully taken, built, and then given away through kinder gestures as museum collections. Liberal philanthropy often passes through the bodies of tycoons’ wives. For instance, when Mrs. Rockefeller, who was the MOMA’s third president founded MoMA with her husband and other millionaire wives. Thus the museum is not an innocuous place that records, collects, and displays art, but a fundamental institution of hegemonic economic, political, and cultural influence. The history of art collecting, then, might also be told through the wives of powerful barons who aim to widen their cultural power in urban metropolises.

It is important to mention the gendered implications of these imperial histories of extractivism, war, and architecture that are then returned as liberal philanthropic motives to establish cultural institutions

Rockefeller’s deep connection, ties, and direct political influence to expanding the hemispheric carceral state in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Cold War criminalized the Latin American political Left, its intellectuals, and activists as subversives, producing death, suffering, and the destruction in its wake. By targeting insurgent and militant groups through imprisonment and disappearance, resource empires created new architectures of security, extraction, and containment. Neoliberalism as a new and intensifying phase of capitalism that was born within dictatorship, required the decimation of those whose political imaginaries ran counter to the extractive machine. There is no innocence in these cultural substrates, just the damage of authoritarian afterlives and the fosas comunas.At the end of his life, Rockefeller had become not only the world’s richest man, but also its greatest philanthropist. Yet in Latin America, Rockefeller has never been a benevolent paternal symbol, but a figurehead for the cruelties of American empire that dispossesses by racializing, dismembering and eradicating. 

Thee obdurate connections between American empire, extractivism, and art are not always as documented and seen as they were in the recent Whitney Museum’s show Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art (1925-1935). Though I’d seen the mural in art catalogues dozens of times, it was incredible to personally experience to witness the mural replica of Diego Rivera’s “Man at the Crossroads,” the 1934 fresco that had been painted in the Rockefeller Center. The original work was chiseled off the wall because Rivera painted Lenin’s figure in direct opposition to Rockefeller, who commissioned the piece. Influenced by New York Leftist groups to make stronger visual connections to power hierarchies in his work, Rivera painted in the figures of the peasant and the worker as part of a communist future. This rare overt inscription to the precursor history of the Cold War and the paternal role of Rockefeller as a kind of heteropatriarchal figure of hemispheric capitalism offers an important artistic document of US economic and military domination.

Extractivism and Art Washing

Extractive art washing, as I define it here, is the recurrent capitalist practice that invests in art and art collections as a fungible commodity, normalizing colonial and modern relations of biodiverse resource theft. The US is not exceptional as all nation states in our carbon extractive world depend upon an entangled web of oil and art. This does not mean that museums do not have continuing social and cultural value, but instead it’s important to recognize that they collect, exhibit, and program in the long shadow of petroleum empires. 

New York art galleries and their collections have long served as repositories for investment bankers and multibillionaire international conglomerates. Art ownership is a form of control over political and social value through the fungibility of art as a highly valuable commodity. A primary feature of collected art is that it expresses and erases the violence of the accumulative practices of capitalism and their carbon and imperial origins.

The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a privately held collection based in both New York and Venezuela, archives a growing collection of Latin American contemporary art. The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, established at MoMA in 2016, is yet another influential site of philanthropy and empire. But what does the Cisneros name represent? Gustavo A. Cisneros, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros’s husband, as the New York Times reported in 2002, is “a multibillionaire whose international conglomerate of 70 companies relies on unfettered access to high-ranking political and economic officials in nearly 40 countries.” Such unfettered political access, as Galeano was careful to note, is never innocent in the distribution of myriad forms inequality.

Cisneros made his fortune through diverse assets, with Venezuelan oil in the pre-Chavez period serving as the stronghold of his first earnings. When easy access to underground petroleum reserves proved difficult, Cisneros diversified his portfolio and become one of the richest men in South America. In the post-Pinochet period of expanded neoliberalization in the region, state policies aimed at privatization and deregulation only helped grow Cisneros’s multinational economic and political influence throughout the Americas and world. 

Currently, Grupo Cisneros is a vast empire based in Coral Gables, Florida and a conglomerate of digital media, entertainment, tourist, and real estate investments, with an astounding consumer audience that reaches more than 600 million Spanish and Portuguese speaking peoples throughout the hemisphere and in Europe. Grupo Cisneros is also one of the largest investors in Univision, broadly known as a conservative media organization with massive global social and political influence upon Latinx American and European markets. 

The Cisneros MoMA collection was founded by Mrs. Cisneros, a powerful patron and nexus figure of art patronage in her own right. Yet, behind the surface of what has become one of the most important collections of Latin American modern art and meaningful curatorial projects and fellowships, are deep connections to extractive industries. Most recently, gold excavation in the Cotuí, Dominican Republic and in Antioquia, Columbia have become at the center of increased expansion of the Cisnero’s empire. Gold mining extraction is an extremely toxic process that poisons the land. These contemporary currents of Américas art cannot hide the structural conditions that produce a billionaire class by destroying human and more than human communities.

Plundering petroleum rich biodiverse Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous territories is a core tenet of colonial modernity and the forms of accumulating capital in both the Global North and Global South. Yet in the digital era, investments in oil, water, forests, or even pharmaceuticals and real estate are not the only lucrative commodity, as the rise of communications and digital media empires are the past, present, and future of extractive capitalism. 

Media and communications platforms provide valuable source materials that can be abstracted in ways that racialized capital thrives upon. And, new technologies depend upon the same language as resource extraction, such as “mining” big data, “prospecting” and “collecting” biomatter, “tracking” users through surveillance, and normalizing dispossession through the agendas of the political right. Further, the military state is both the originator of and thoroughly engrained in the domination by this new media matrix. 

Plundering petroleum rich biodiverse Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous territories is a core tenet of colonial modernity and the forms of accumulating capital in both the Global North and Global South

The ability of the Cisneros Group to accumulate more than twenty billion dollars of net worth through media conglomerates, gold mining, and oil extraction at a time of increasing economic divisions in the world is evidence of the tightening grip of new frontier of extraction. Such investments into art and culture, particularly in New York, are part of the return upon extracted value, as appreciation, rent, and a rise in capital gains. In a world that circulates collected art as fungible exchange to continually build up the billionaire class while destituting the majority especially racialized peoples and geographies, the artist and scholar can play an active role in locating, exposing, and unearthing the architectures of extraction.

Post-Extractive Futures

When I lived in Los Angeles, there were important struggles happening in East Los Angeles and in Boyle Heights over art-washing and gentrification of Chicanx historic spaces. Over the past decade, the intimate connections between real estate capitalist investment and an extractive art industry that displaces and dispossesses primarily black, Latinx, and immigrant communities of color have increasingly polarized many cities. In the case of MoMA, as in the case of other museums like the Whitney, the target has been the board of trustees where the entanglements with weapons, illegal art collections, gold, silver, copper, oil, and media remind us once again of the importance of following the money. 

Over the past couple of years, since Strike MoMA, I have thought a lot about the complexity of what it means to confront liberal institutions for their historic power grabs, their complicity and involvement in petroleum and carbon induced climate change, their explicit connections to the machine of war, empire, and Indigenous territories, including Palestinian dispossession. Even as it’s always difficult to speak truth to power, Strike MoMA has crystallized for me the importance of transversal and coalitional work in creating new spaces for solidarity in an increasingly authoritarian, skewed, and unjust world.

Over the past decade, the intimate connections between real estate capitalist investment and an extractive art industry that displaces and dispossesses primarily black, Latinx, and immigrant communities of color have increasingly polarized many cities

In her book The Feminist International, Veronica Gago points to the target of the state as the horizon of collective political potential. Gago builds upon the work of anarchist Rosa Luxemburg to consider how feminist, precarious labor, informal economy, Indigenous, queer and trans-alliances provide new ways to counter the patriarchal and violent conditions of the modern and colonial state. This is a theoretically rich and elegant argument, and I don’t want to reduce the importance of embodied activism and theory-action work to a few lines. Instead, I would like to consider how the racial and heteropatriarchal state, especially in the Global North, and in particularly in the United States, is certainly not the only horizon of political struggle. In epicenters like New York City, the art museum represents an extractive epicenter, and an important site for multiple demands and dispossessions. A way to work together to un-world and rebuild towards another future. 

During the first wave of its efforts, which have been renewed now, Strike MoMA expressed diverse political articulations. It reflected upon the plight of the Palestinian people in the face of an apartheid state; it connected to Global South decolonization movements through deep study; it studies ongoing struggle for black people’s freedom, immigrant rights, and internationalism, alongside other issues of south/south and critical forms of solidarity. Maybe targeting carbon centers and media empires is what is needed. Maybe striking in every way possible is exactly what we must do unbuild the colonial planetary and think towards the post carbon potential of a non-extractive future. 

Postscript: Beyond the Colonial Binary

To live in such complicated times, between the loss of one empire and the rise of others. In times when crises, both intimate and imagined, state and national, become fodder for the capitalist machine. We live in the fracture, a time when our creative joy and faith in the potential of institutions is hijacked and without innocence. Who doesn’t know how bankrupt the institution is? Yet we continue to program, engage, and educate from within. And we try to improve it, demand from it. And to receive something in return. For all these reasons we demand.

As I have been researching and writing this essay, I also have inhabited the acute contradiction of our times. The important internal and external work at my own institutional has has led to the recent returns by the Lindeman family, biollionaire art collectors of objects that date back 1,200 years to the Khmer Empire in what is now Cambodia. The story of the looted objects that were first purchased from art dealers and have been returned to the Cambodian government is extraordinary. As is the fact that Cambodian investigators first saw the items in the background of an Architectural Digest feature story that showcased the Lindemann mansion. There is truly an extractive architecture to unearth here between the occupation of land, resource extraction, art collections, theft and the potential for return.

I’ve been asked: What to do with the stolen artifacts? I say: Give them back. I’ve been asked: What to do with the museum spaces? I say: Program and distribute the funding to artists, especially disenfranchised queer and trans artists of color, and most of all to those not living inside the institution and in the spaces of so much resource theft. I’ve been asked: Who should sit on the boards. And I say: Don’t make trustees out of carbon and oil kings. Or out of the punishment monarchy. Divest in those who invest in the military and police. Divest and unbuild to re-invest and make anew in the otherwise. But it doesn’t mean I don’t live these difficult and uneasy contradictions each day and, in every place I work, inhabit, occupy, and endure. Like Theo Cuthand’s reflection, I too wrestle with these contradictions and continually unsettle. And I engage the methods I know best. To unearth to expose the deep relations of extractive architectures. 

NOTA EDITORIAL:

Aquest assaig, en la seva versió original i completa, va ser encarregat originalment per Strike MoMA com a part de les seves activitats de mobilització i va ser reescrit per al dossier d’E-Flux el novembre de 2023. L’autora va decidir adaptar-ne una versió més breu per a la revista Mangrana, traduïda al català i publicada en el nostre darrer número. Donada la importància cultural, política i social d’aquest contingut, oferim aquí la versió original en anglès, més extensa, per a totes aquelles persones que vulguin aprofundir-hi.