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Free, booking essential
Join us for an online talk on Indigenous and diasporic feminist ways of knowing land and body
Our relationships to land shape how we understand ourselves and the histories we carry. Bringing Indigenous ways of knowing into dialogue with diasporic feminist thought, this conversation explores how the body connects us to land and how these relationships are shaped by ancestry and experiences of displacement. In doing so, it considers different ways of understanding our place in the world and the responsibilities we hold towards one another.
Taking Autograph’s exhibition Our Bodies Have Been Bridges as a starting point, writer Zakia Sewell will join anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (and a third speaker to be announced) for a conversation examining the politics of knowledge production – whose ways of understanding the world are recognised, how knowledge acquires authority and how alternative ways of knowing challenge established structures of power.
While the exhibition presents photography as a means through which artists assert their presence and challenge dominant modes of representation, the conversation extends these questions beyond the visual field. Chaired by Sewell, the discussion will consider how people and communities produce knowledge about their own lives, challenging the separation of nature and culture and foregrounding embodied and collective ways of knowing.
Everyone is welcome to join, from any location. The primary language used will be English.
Closed captioning will be enabled at this Zoom event. During the event, click the closed caption icon to start captions and view the live transcript
Only our event speakers and host will be visible on screen. Attendees will not be visible on screen.
Zakia Sewell is a writer, DJ and broadcaster based in London. She hosts Dream Time on BBC Radio 6 Music, and was a host on NTS Radio from 2016-2024. Zakia has produced and presented radio documentaries and podcasts for platforms such as BBC Radio 3 and 4, Tate and Camden Art Centre.
Her first book, Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain, was published in 2026 and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction. She regularly gives talks and her writing has appeared in publications including Tate Etc., Resident Advisor and Weird Walk and in the essay collection This Woman's Work (White Rabbit, 2022).
Trained as an anthropologist in Peru, England France and the US, her work interrogates several interfaces: those between STS (Science and Technology Studies) and non-STS, between major and minor key politics (and what exceeds both) between history and the a-historical. She is interested in ethnographic concepts, that is, those that blur the distinction between what we call theory and the empirical and can indicate the limits of both.
Overall, she revels in what she call ‘not knowing’ as epistemic stance. Her recent book Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015) was written in the presence of Mariano and Nazario Turpo, including Ausangate, an earth being (and a mountain) that presides over vital landscapes in Cuzco, Peru. With them she thinks the intriguing crossroads where modern politics (and history) and earth-beings (and the ahistorical) meet and diverge. Performing what she calls onto-epistemic openings, the book is an ethnography concerned with the concreteness of incommensurability and the eventfulness of the ahistorical.
Currently her field sites are cattle ranches, peasant farms, slaughter houses, cattle fairs, breed-making genetic laboratories, and veterinary schools in Colombia. There she engages what she calls cow terraforming practices/relations. Thinking at divergent bio/geo interfaces, she is interested in “the stuff” that makes life and death across labscapes and landscapes in a country that itself struggles between war and peace.
Banner: Koyoltzintli, Spider Woman Embrace, 2019. From the series MEDA. © and courtesy the artist.
Speakers: Courtesy the artists.
Inspired by: Koyoltzintli, Obsidian Woman, 2019. From the series MEDA. © and courtesy the artist.
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Autograph is a space to see things differently. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice, sharing how photographs reflect lived experiences and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.
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