Keller Easterling: ATTTNT

Abstract

Black land ownership in the US dropped from 15 million acres in 1910 to 3 million in 1970. In the 1960s, among the many activists who traveled to the South to fight for civil rights, some remained to expose forms of land theft and support the Black economy with cooperative organizations that linked the US South with the Global South. A constant undertow of white violence, abetted by government agencies, prevented further retention or restoration of land, but the detailed work, often in collaboration with HBCUs, identified land assets and developed land-holding organs and Black institutions to manage those resources.

Returning to areas weighted with multiple traditions, the work, when reconstructed, begins to materialize a special infrastructure possessing the superabundant values of land, community, and education—an infrastructure as worthy of public investment as infrastructures of concrete and conduit. And as a planetary formation, it renews global political solidarities from the 1960s and 70s to address the root causes of climate change. But this infrastructure is also a scar that does not try to cover over its ugliness and pain. Both recalling and foretelling, it marks more patterns of harm and debt to add to those of slavery while demonstrating how they are all inextricably linked to future climate dangers. It simultaneously gives shape to these patterns as well as the reparations and preparations to address them. The work these activists did is a remarkable gift, as yet unopened, offering incalculable values to diffuse contemporary binaries and address an incalculable debt.

Biography

Keller Easterling is a designer, writer, and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. She is currently working on a book about land activism in the US after the Civil Rights Movement. Other books include Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934 to 1960. Easterling lectures and exhibits internationally. Her research and writing was included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennales. Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist in Architecture and Design.