Follow through the implications – beyond the immediate, into the long-term

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST): Coalition for Land Rights

1984-present

Brazil

A movement representing the interests of landless, poor and Indigenous people, using education, direct action, and media to achieve land reform, and understanding its task to resist both social and ecological degradation through extractive agro-business and industry

Context

In Brazil, private land ownership, combined with harmful practices that extract natural resources and exploit people’s labour, has mapped the country along axes of capital accumulation and control. Calls for land reform to democratise space and access to resources grew in the early and mid twentieth century. They included grassroots campaigns led by Leftist activists and peasant leagues in northeastern Brazil who resisted the exploitation of land and people such as tenant evictions and large-scale cattle ranching. Campaigns such as these planted seeds for further organising and activism.¹ But they also met fierce and brutal opposition. Numerous oppressive political regimes, including a period of military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, suppressed peasant leagues and enabled large-scale plantation and ranching monopolies to develop land from which poor, Indigenous communities were evicted. Violating people’s spatial rights to safe and habitable lands, and the rights of nature itself, these imposed systems of intensive financialised land use constructed rigid and often arbitrary borders to demarcate land ownership, simultaneously damaging ecosystems and communities.

Practice

Building upon grassroots campaigns led by earlier peasant leagues, a coalition of Indigenous people, the Landless Workers’ Movement (in Portuguese: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) formed in 1984 to defend their rights to land and self-determination. To this day MST reimagines and realigns governance within living earth systems, calling for a “Just Transition” towards regenerative economies and inclusive democracies. It has over 1.5 million members based across Brazil.

MST’s central objective is land reform through agrarian laws and policies that would give Indigenous people rights to land for growing food and looking after ecosystems. It points towards sections of the Brazilian constitution which indicate that land should have a social function, and defines its goal as exactly that: to unite spatial and social functions of rural land for the common good and the protection of biodiversity.²

MST lists barriers for achieving land reform, including racism, sexism, media monopolisation which neglects reporting land disputes, and socio-economic inequality. MST uses direct action strategies including land occupation to reclaim space. It also runs its own schools across primary and secondary ages and in adult and higher education contexts, focusing on issues of social solidarity and ecology.

Through its culture sector, MST fosters international partnerships with artists and researchers to communicate its work to wider audiences. In this context, the photographer Sebastião Salgado worked with MST on his exhibition and book Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997). Harnessing cultural engagement and global audiences through collaborations with artists like Salgado is a crucial means for MST to increase its impact abroad and harness modern media and communication techniques for direct action.

In the 2000s, the Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso criticised MST for wanting a return to “an archaic agrarian past”.³ But according to an anonymous member, MST desires land reform to build “a new way of life”.⁴ The contrast between these two opinions, one demonising land reform as archaic and the other celebrating it as future-oriented, illustrates the extent of the struggle that continues today between capitalist land owners in Brazil and those who would like to steward the land.

Other Indigenous groups, including Ñambi Rimai in Colombia and Karrabing in Australia, use media in a similar way to raise international awareness and gain support on issues of land dispossession. MST’s aim of replacing territorial borders with ecological boundaries, meanwhile, resonates with eco-political reforms underway in other regions of South America, such as in Chile and Ecuador. These campaigns for ecological protections to accommodate the needs of local communities and more-than-human habitats exemplify strategies for what the Colombian theorist Arturo Escobar calls a “renovation of life”.⁵

Notes

1
Michael Moran and Geraint Parry, eds. Democracy and Democratization (London: Routledge, 1994) p. 191.
2
See Articles 5, 184 and 186 of Brazil’s current Constitution (1988)
3
Eugene Walker Gogol. The concept of Other in Latin American liberation: fusing emancipatory philosophic thought and social revolt (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2002) p. 318.
4
Quoted by Jeff Noonan. Democratic society and human needs (Montreal, Quebec and Kingston, Ontario: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2006) p. 244.
5
Arturo Escobar. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 13.

Karrabing Film Collective: Solidarity and Satire Against Settler Colonialism

2009-present

Northwest coast of the Northern Territory, Australia

A media collective using video and installation to communicate issues of environmental devastation, land restrictions, racism, and economic exploitation, and a sense of heritage and cultural resistance to these issues.

Context

Climate damage and social inequity intersect with devastating consequences in Australia’s Northern Territory, where Aboriginal people have faced decades of neo/colonial violence and socioeconomic marginalisation. Matters have worsened with environmental devastation caused by mining and tourism.

Practice

In the face of such devastation, Karrabing Film Collective works as an Indigenous media group that uses filmmaking to document neocolonialist racism whereby Australia’s government, with its white settler mentality, sells Indigenous lands to mining companies and undermines Indigenous culture, rights, and capabilities.

The Collective’s videos satirise obstacles that members face in interacting with corporate and state powers. Shot on handheld cameras or phones, videos are made in intentionally accessible ways that forego expensive film equipment or expertise. Videos are sometimes accompanied by drawings or maps – for example, Karrabing recently combined the production of a film with the digital mapping of a network of rock weirs and shell middens damaged by erosion and climate change, with the goal of creating a cultural heritage area. Karrabing’s understanding of heritage challenges amnesiac accounts of Australian history that begin with white settlers. Its projects extend backwards into deep ancestral and planetary time, and expose the shared extractive mentalities of settler colonial government and contemporary mining industries.

Beyond such outputs, Karrabing’s organisation is an important example of a highly interdisciplinary and politicised practice of mutual aid. Karrabing means “low tide” in the Emmiyengal language, and refers to a fluid form of collective organisation freed from the Australian government and its strictures around land ownership. The collective comprises some thirty extended family members whose ancestral lands stretch across the coastline of the Cox Peninsula. Members speak five languages between them but consider themselves one family or “mob”.¹ Karrabing’s videos speak of injustices, often through parodic reenactments of bureaucratic tangles that expose issues of racism and climate damage to audiences worldwide. Members often accompany their films on tour to present their way of life as a challenge to extractive capitalism’s status quo. The collective’s approach emphasises belonging to each other, the land, and the more-than-human beings who travel across it. The north American anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli is the group’s only non-Indigenous member, and trained in anthropology to help the group fight for recognition: the Australian Land Act requires that Indigenous groups provide a lawyer and anthropologist in order to formally seek recognition.² As Povinelli explains, resisting extractive capitalisms logic of separation and exploitation, “Karrabing seeks to hold in place a… relationality… summarized in the creole phrase, ‘roanroan and connected’, which essentially means ‘One’s own because of its connection to others’”.³

Notes

1
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘The Rise of an Indigenous Europe and the Genealogies of Indigeneities.’ Berliner Festspiele, Media Library, Gropius Bau (2022)<https://mediathek.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropius-bau/journal/der-aufstieg-eines-indigenen-europas-und-die-genealogien-der-indigenitaeten> [accessed 15 November 2022].
2
Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 22.
3
Povinelli, ‘The Rise of an Indigenous Europe’.

Who Builds Your Architecture?: Asking Questions and Bridging Divides

2011-present

Global USA

An international network of academics and educators formed to examine the link and distances between architects, their design, and the labour conditions within the construction industry

Context

“When architects talk about embodied energy, very rarely are they talking about actual bodies. But the bodies are there, extracting, transporting and processing the materials.”¹

Architecture is made by people, but the increasing fragmentation of the construction industry has disassociated architects from the people who develop and produce materials, provide services, and build buildings—as well as the conditions they work in. Notwithstanding a few significant examples where architects have sought to better engage with construction sites and other places of production as spaces of labour, there is a distinct mismatch between design and conditions of production. In addition, large-scale projects and architectural services conducted across global regions further dissociate architects based in one country from material outcomes occurring in another.

Practice

The project “Who Builds Your Architecture?” (WBYA?) was established by a group of architects in the USA, many of whom were also engaged in research and teaching, to expose human rights abuses in the building industry, to explore the lack or insufficiency of existing ethical codes, and to propose ways in which architects might collaborate on improving labour conditions.²

Following the example of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition’s protests at the site of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi,³ WBYA? documents global supply chains and architecture’s reliance on labour, describing labour relations and confronting the profession with its complicity and responsibility. Countering Zaha Hadid’s comments after reports of workers’ deaths during her project in Qatar (“I have nothing to do with the workers”⁴), Kadambari Baxi, a co-founder of WBYA?, said:

“It’s very easy for architects to think that they have nothing to do with the workers. That it’s the subcontractors, or the sub-subcontractors, who really hire them. […] Part of our mandate is to show these connections and links—to show that we do have something to do with this.”⁵

The WBYA? project began as a panel discussion in 2012 at the New School in New York, growing into a multi-year series of exhibitions, workshops, and publications. A second panel in 2013 explored architecture’s connection to climate by placing “what architects do within a complex system of relationships that include users and owners, energy and material sources, climatic and site conditions, and architects and buildings”.⁶ The panel explored links between green-building certifications such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), and architectural and labour practices. The panel found that the climate impact of building is not only material and atmospheric, but also human, though conventional “sustainability” discourse often excludes the latter.⁷

Informed by research, WBYA? employs the language of architectural drawings and diagrams in its publication, “Who Builds Your Architecture?: A Critical Field Guide”, but unlike many architectural publications, this one centres workers in its narrative.⁸ This publication, available freely online, discusses workers’ living conditions, employment rights, and safety concerns, in relation to practices of architectural design and specification, professional codes, and industrial regulations. This relating of one domain to the other is crucial in bridging conventionally separated remits.

By bridging architects and workers, WBYA? builds connections in and between different areas of architectural production, connecting issues of materials, energy, and labour to form a network of solidarity. Such networking is crucial for intervening in architecture’s often exclusionary and privileged systems and proposing spatial practices that are at once more socially and ecologically careful.

Notes

1
Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, ‘The Missing Bodies in Architecture’s Talk of Embodied Energy’, Failed Architecture, 25 September 2019 <https://failedarchitecture.com/the-missing-bodies-in-architectures-talk-of-embodied-energy/> [accessed 14 October 2022].
2
See also Elizabeth Greenspan, ‘Who Builds Your Architecture?’, Architect Magazine, 6 July 2017 <https://www.architectmagazine.com/practice/who-builds-your-architecture_o> [accessed 14 October 2022].
3
Gulf Labor Artist Coalition <https://gulflabour.org/> [accessed 23 October 2023].
4
James Riach, ‘Zaha Hadid defends Qatar World Cup role following migrant worker deaths’, The Guardian, 25 February 2014 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/25/zaha-hadid-qatar-world-cup-migrant-worker-deaths> [accessed 14 October 2022].
5
Kadambari Baxi, Jordan H. Carver, Laura Diamond Dixit, Lindsey Wikstrom Lee, Mabel O. Wilson with Tiffany Rattray and Beth Stryker, Who Builds Your Architecture?: A Critical Field Guide (New York, 2017) <http://whobuilds.org/who-builds-your-architecture-a-critical-field-guide/> [accessed 14 October 2022].
6
wbya?, ’WBYA? 2.0: Sustainability and Sustaining Human Life’, Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?), 22 April 2013 <http://whobuilds.org/wbya-2-0-sustainability-and-sustaining-human-life-2/> [accessed 14 October 2022].
7
See also Ann Lui, “Sustainability of Workers’ Rights”, Archinect, 23 May 2011 <https://archinect.com/features/article/7370136/sustainability-of-workers-rights> [accessed 14 October 2022].
8
Baxi, Carver, Dixit, Lee, Wilson, Rattray, Stryker, ‘Who Builds Your Architecture?’

Exploiting Natural Resources

Architecture in its present mode is almost entirely reliant on the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, claiming them as free or cheap materials for production. The industrialisation of nature is evidenced in the construction sector and built environment. The modern era is shaped by the supply of seemingly abundant energy. The display of fresh technologies depends on raiding the natural world, which is treated as a standing reserve. Practices including logging or fracking that supply construction materials and fuel damage the climate irreparably, as do waste disposal methods. It is, however, possible and necessary to work with resources that are renewable, renewed, or regenerative.

Ignoring Consequences

The urgent realities of climate breakdown are too often shadowed by forms of denial or delay. This is symptomatic of the ignoring of consequences, where the seduction of future visions too often masks associated impacts. Confronting the actual consequences of climate breakdown commonly results in paralysing anxiety. The consequences of climate breakdown are also too often described in terms of threat, imposition, and loss, and thus dismissed. Ignoring consequences does not make them go away, but displaces them to poorer communities, regions of the Global South, and future generations.

Infrastructure

Infrastructures are critical support systems inseparable from climate. Infrastructures affect their surroundings, introducing physical and organisational structures that shape the operation of a society. From motorway systems to gas-pipelines, infrastructures conventionally rely on technocratic approaches, usually using carbon-intensive means to ‘fix’ individual situations, overlooking the integrated nature of problems by isolating them in closed systems. Too often, various infrastructures are overlaid on each other in a wasteful and non-relational manner, or new ones endlessly replace older ones in a cycle of obsolescence. Instead, infrastructures need to be understood as processes with profound impacts on the human and beyond-human. Such an understanding combines the material with the immaterial and brings together the physical, social, and digital; new forms of infrastructure need to be dynamic, complex, ambiguous, and situated. In the face of climate breakdown, it is crucial to recognise and recover infrastructures as support systems that work with the world rather than from above. This involves drawing from principles of regeneration and a deep understanding of change and temporality.

Policy

Policies at a national, regional, and local level frame and thus determine action in relation to climate. Often attributed to elites, policies are criticised for their ineffectiveness, narrow focus on single issues, and tendency to reinforce the status quo through risk management approaches. Climate-related policies are more effective as relational devices that cut across disciplinary, political, and conceptual boundaries, consistent with the relational conditions of climate. This suggests the need for policies that are beyond partial fixes and expose the conditions in which things are made, as a form of analysis as well as future projection: policies that are informed by activism, a concern for Gaia, the rights of nature. Bringing policies back to their original roots in citizenship as means for collective betterment is crucial, particularly given that the lack of effective climate action is tied to democratic deficits. This is why citizens assemblies, practices of participatory governance, and other forms of redistributed decision-making become central to more equitable climate action.

Architecture is Climate

Sarah Bovelett

Anthony Powis

Tatjana Schneider

Christina Serifi

Jeremy Till

Becca Voelcker

Follow through the implications – beyond the immediate, into the long-term