Watery Histories – a conversation between artists Katarina Pirak Sikku and Léuli Eshrāghi

Artists Katarina Pirak Sikku and Léuli Eshrāghi in conversation, as part of the launch of the book Climate: Our Right to Breathe, Gothenburg City Library, October 12, 2022.

Climate: Our Right to Breathe is a book in response to vast, mutually exacerbating planetary conditions: the accelerated collapse of the biosphere under climate change and the increasingly crushing dynamics of toxic politics. But, the reactionary, divisionary politics driven by ruthless forms of authoritarianism, denialism, nationalism, and other globalized forms of oppression and dispossession are also a call to action.

In L’Internationale’s most recently published anthology, more than twenty-five voices from the arts and culture form an internationalist chorus that emphatically responds to a collective need to develop common strategies for solidarity when many limits of the Earth system have already been surpassed. Because racialized capitalism cannot be separated from ecological disaster, vulnerable and often marginalized communities are forced to endure the worst effects of the climate crises. It is imperative to work in solidarity against the uneven violence of these times.

Mobilized by diverse practices and backgrounds, a number of contributors to this book gathered in Gothenburg to offer both speculative perspectives on and pragmatic relays from the intersectional fight for climate justice and multispecies survivance, intentionally on the date of October 12, the day that marks a point in the colonialism of the South Americas.

This video was produced as part of the launch of the L'Internationale Online publication Climate: Our Right to Breathe, in late 2022. Camera and editing: Thomas Frank and Orlando Nigro.