Forest Islands of our ecological diaspora

Imani Jacqueline Brown (New Orleans, 1988) is an artist, activist, writer and researcher. Her work maps the scope and ongoing violence of the capitalist and extractivist agents that led to slavery, colonial genocide and ecological saturation. From the microecologies of black cemeteries that manifest as groves of trees interrupting a horizon of sugarcane plantations and petrochemical plants, to the gentrification of New Orleans on the back of hurricane Katrina, Imani's practice exposes the layers of violence that underpin settler-colonial society. At the same time, she discovers overlapping and enduring practices of ecological resistance and care through time and space in black ecologies.