In Louisiana’s Mississippi River Delta, fossil fuel corporations have dredged 10,000 miles of canals to drill over 80,000 oil and gas wells, which connect through 50,000 miles of pipeline to over 200 plants in the “Petrochemical Corridor.” Invasive infrastructure has disrupted ecological integrity, killing the vegetation that holds sediment together as land; 2,000 square miles of wetlands have disintegrated into the sea. With each successive hurricane, ecological communities increasingly disintegrate into a diaspora. This disintegration cannot be comprehended without investigating its origins: the Corridor was once called “Plantation Country;” each plant occupies the footprints of fallow slave plantations. Each parcel of private property holds the strata of 300 years of extractivism, but also resistance to it: unmarked burial grounds of the historically enslaved survive as sacred groves of trees, more-than-human micro-ecologies that conspire with their living descendants to combat carbon dioxide emissions and block petrochemical expansion.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work investigates the continuum of extractivism, which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that comprise the foundations of American society, she opens up space to imagine paths to ecological reparations. Brown is a researcher with Forensic Architecture, an economic inequality fellow with Open Society Foundations, and the editor of Black Ecologies (MARCH, 2021). She has initiated several collective art/activist/spatial practice projects, including Blights Out (2014–18) and Fossil Free Fest (2018), and was a member of Occupy Museums (2011–18). Brown has worked across the United States, as well as internationally in the United Kingdom, Poland, and Germany. She received her master’s with distinction from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London (2019) and her bacherlor’s in anthropology and visual arts from Columbia University (2010).