Post-Extractive Imaginaries talk series

This talk/conversation revolves around a history of industrial chemical production on Teesside in North East England, developed through research for the 2021-2022 exhibition Chemical City (MIMA, Middlesbrough). Industrial synthesis remade nature, labour, and everyday life while engendering enduring harms, which persist beyond industrial decline. What type of attention needs still to be paid to the residue and unfinished histories. Focusing on a single industrial landscape, and for the most part on a single industrial conglomerate, Imperial Chemical Industries,  the research traces how injustice accumulates across temporal scales: from immediate atmospheric toxicity and its uneven exposure, through the bodily harms to and eventual redundancy of industrial labour, to the long after-presence even in absence of extractive and synthetic processes embedded in geology, soil, air, and water. The research proposes a methodology of synthesis based on encountering, observing, speculating, listening. It uses imagination to patch many gaps and wounds in the landscape and the archive - gaps that are not aired in conventional company histories. The research draws on heterogeneous materials, including corporate self-imaging, loaded with fantasy, legal records and reports, monitoring various failures, company material culture, parliamentary debates, photographs of the factories and the clouds they produce, oral histories and local conspiracy theories, political processes, including corruption, coincidence and surprise. Space is given too to the testimonial capacities of matter and weather. These various approaches are a means of remdering both the fatedness and the historical production and reproduction of a place. 

Bio

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies of Walter Benjamin, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts (2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016) and The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensism and the Environment (2023). Work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson, includes Deeper in the Pyramid (2018/2023). A study of anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen (written with Sam Dolbear) appeared in 2023:  Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century.  

The Post-Extractive Visualities 2026 programme includes contributions from Marc Wilson, whose project The Edge of Ruin examines sites of rationality, power and their limits; Esther Leslie, whose work on cultural histories of industry, materials and modernity offers critical frameworks for understanding extraction and its afterlives; and Helene Engnes Birkeli, whose practice engages with post-extractive thinking through artistic and research-led enquiry. Please see sidebar for links to the other events in the series.