Eva Díaz: "We Are All Aliens"

06/05/18 • 34 min

Eva Díaz discusses her essay "We Are All Aliens" published in e-flux journal issue 91 (May 2018) with contributing editor Elvia Wilk.

"For some, contemporary art has become a kind of alt-science platform for research and development projects that offer alternatives to the corporate control and surveillance of outer space. Artists working on issues about access to space are at the front line of a critical investigation about the contours of the future, both in its material form and social organization. Many of these artists are challenging the current expansion of capitalist and colonial practices into outer space, particularly that of so-called 'primitive' accumulation: the taking of land and resources for private use. They recognize that much of the tremendous capital amassed in the early 2000s e-commerce and tech boom is now being funneled into astronomically costly 'New Space' projects such as SpaceX, a company funded by PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, the space enterprise of Amazon's Jeff Bezos."

–Excerpt from "We Are All Aliens"

Eva Díaz has taught at the Pratt Institute in New York since 2009. Her book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on a new book titled After Spaceship Earth, analyzing the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art.

Eva Díaz discusses her essay "We Are All Aliens" published in e-flux journal issue 91 (May 2018) with contributing editor Elvia Wilk.

–Excerpt from "We Are All Aliens"

Previous Episode

Masha Gessen on how to survive an autocracy

Journalist and author Masha Gessen discusses ways of surviving an autocracy. Rule #1? Believe the autocrat.

For this week’s episode of the e-flux podcast, we are featuring Masha Gessen’s lecture, "How We Survive an Autocracy," originally given on May 24, 2017 as part of an ongoing e-flux lectures series dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming that these still exist.

Launched in February 2017, most e-flux lectures are live streamed on e-flux.com/live and archived at e-flux.com/video.

Masha Gessen is a journalist and author, whose most recent book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen is also the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Next Episode

Mirene Arsanios on mother tongues

Mirene Arsanios discusses her text, "E Autobiography di un Idioma," published in e-flux journal #92—"on feminisms" (Summer 2018). In conversation with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen.

"I would have liked to come to you (abo) with something more reliable, like documents (akto), but I’m an oral language (idioma)—an Afro-Portuguese proto-creole developed on the western coast (kosta) of Africa and brought over to the Caribbean in the seventeen century. That’s one of the theories of my genesis. There are others (otronan). Dutch and Spanish tagged along at later stages, with a few Arawak words (palabranan). Initially, slave traders and slaves used me to 'communicate'; then I was just used (merka). The only document in my possession says I was born on the island of Curaçao, north of the Venezuelan shore. Linguists struggle to match my identity to a location. Words travel and land in places (luganan) that do not match their jurisdiction (a nation (nashon)-state)."—Mirene Arsanios, "E Autobiography di un Idioma"

Other works mentioned:—Iman Mersal, الصوت في غير مكانه (The Displaced Voice); trans. Lisa White (New York: Belladonna* Collaborative, chaplet #232, 2018). Excerpt read by Belladonna editor Ana Paula.—Iman Mersal, "عن الأمومة والعنف، إيمان مرسال (On Motherhood and Violence)," trans. Anna Ziajka Stanton, Makhzin issue #2—FEMINISMS (Daisy Atterbury, Tarek El-Ariss and Mirene Arsanios, editors)—Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Macmillan, 1996).

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Arsanios cofounded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. On Friday nights, you can find her at the Poetry Project in New York, where she coordinates the Friday Night reading series with Rachel Valinsky.