Displacements and Translations within the Body-Territory: Interpreting Black and campesinx struggles in a co-created video podcast on re-existences in mining landscapes

Keywords: body-territory, co-creation, video podcast, mining extractivism, radical politics
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Deep Bonds, along the Atrato River’s sources (originally Lazos Profundos, por los nacimientos del Atrato) is the first season of a “territorial video podcast” consisting of four 45-minute episodes addressing the embodied experiences of mining extractivism along the upper Atrato River in the Chocó region in northwestern Colombia. A team of co-producers working on an embodied and regenerative critique of the Atrato River as “a subject with rights” provided methodological guidance to grassroots community leaders to develop their own video/radio programs. The resulting episodes invite the audience to learn about four topics: (1) women peasant farmers’ struggles for autonomy amid the expansion of a Canadian copper mine, (2) the effects of counter-insurgent armed violence on solidarity economies along the road connecting Medellín and Quibdó, (3) Afro-Chocoan efforts to integrate ancestral knowledge in state-financed reforestation initiatives dealing with mining-induced river degradation, and (4) the importance of defending collective and family-based artisanal underground mining (known as hoyos guache) following the devastation of heavy machinery throughout Black Collective Territories. In this paper, I reflect on co-producing the episodes and translating the conversations into subtitles, drawing connections to the literature in political ecology, the Black Radical Tradition, and communitarian feminisms engaging with body-territory mapping across Abya Yala. I argue that the work of interpreting and translating narratives co-created with grassroots leaders, particularly in opposition to and through the gravitational pulls of extractivism, is a way to practice radical politics, even if much of its fire is lost in translation.