Climate Forum I – Readings

Part of The Climate Reader: Propositions, poetics, operations

Nkule Mabaso

13 Nov 2023

In the context of ‘The Climate Forum’, a series of online events hosted by HDK-Valand as part of Museum of the Commons (2023–2027), L’Internationale Online publishes two texts by Marwa Arsanios and Munem Wasif that appear in Climate: Our Right To Breathe (K Verlag and L’Internationale, 2022). Here, Nkule Mabaso, co-convenor of the first Climate Forum and one of the editors of Climate introduces the texts by way of three anecdotes.

The following anecdotes are organised around the seeds and the colour in order to draw to one’s mind the connections between feminist politics, land struggles, ethnobotany and sustained, embodied archival engagements that present pluralities of resistance to dominant economic and social systems. From Zayaan Khan’s contemplations on land, seed and food as a means of understanding the world, and Munem Wasif’s juxtaposition of archival plant images and Prussian blue cyanotypes of rice seeds that poethically speak of the degradation of indigenous agricultural practises by colonialism and its continuities through colonialist-capitalist legacies of monocultural production, to Marwa Arsanios on the politics of seed collections and preservation.

Anecdote 1

The creole seeds are beings with nonlegal status; the seed guardian is an undesired being with a legal status. She knows that the beings with nonlegal status are her only allies. In this desertic territory, there is a real water scarcity: the little water there is, is either sucked by the hydroelectric mechanism already in place or the one in the process of being built, then diverted through a government-built irrigation system to endless hectares of rice plantations.

Marwa Arsanios11.Marwa Arsanios, ‘A Letter Inside a Letter: How Labor Appears & Disappears’, Climate: Our Right to Breathe (ed. Hiuwai Chu, Meagan Down, Nkule Mabaso, Pablo Martínez, and Corina Oprea), Berlin: K Verlag and L'Internationale, 2022, p. 124–125.

Anecdote 2

[undated notes]

In the leather bag the following items are contained:

2 Skirts, 1 brown, 1 check
1 navy twin set (new)
1 winter night dress
1 winter pyjamas
2 winder panties
1 blue dress
1 yellow jersey

The leather bags were given to the security branch on the 16 May 1969 and given to me on the 06 of May 1970 upon my admission to hospital.

[signed] W. Mandela22.Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013, p. 95–96

Anecdote 3

In the performance gesture titled Made 5 Kisangati sits is a blue dress, on a chair in the middle of a river at the Kwame Nkrumah University, Kumasi, Ghana.