The Brooklyn Rail

Before the Doomsday Clock was set to ninety seconds before midnight, before the fossil fuel industry sent us plummeting into cataclysm, before it began drilling into the earth, before the invention of capital and racial capitalism, before the word petroleum even entered our vocabulary, there were trillions of organisms that died and, over time, became buried beneath layers and layers of sedimentary rock. As we know, those organisms—mostly plankton, plants, and bacteria that lived more than three hundred million years ago—are today extracted as fossil fuels. There was no way of foreseeing that we would use their dead matter to slowly generate our own death. And yet, it is that sedimentary residue of the deep, ancient past that has brought our present disaster to bear, that has been mined to destroy our future.

In Imani Jacqueline Brown’s exhibition Gulf (read “Strike Gulf”), at Storefront for Art and Architecture, these temporalities collide and clasp one another in a trenchant investigation into the history and present of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, from the Chicxulub asteroid impact sixty-six million years ago—which is believed not only to have generated the swell of oil-rich hydrocarbon fields that makes today’s Gulf a capitalist fantasy, but also to have wiped out the dinosaurs in the last major extinction event—to big oil’s ransacking of these same fields during the Anthropocene.

Brown was born in New Orleans, and her work is dense with the inlay of Louisiana’s historic and literal atmospheres: its unique formations of ethnicity, race, and racial hierarchy, its towering shadows of environmental precarity, and its thick spiritual charge. It is from this tremulous social and ecological ground that Gulf springs.

Trace the shadow between this world and the other (2024), a two-channel video, situates us in the call and response between Louisiana’s past and present, juxtaposing contemporary footage of New Orleans in the left-hand channel and digital renderings of the region’s prehistory in the right. The former focuses on the New Orleans North Side Skull and Bones Gang, a society which, during Mardi Gras, parades through the city dressed in costumes that evoke the dead. In the video, their haunting figures are set against blue-black oceanic tones, and I begin to imagine that the group is one of underwater spirits tending to the forms of more-than-human life that inhabit the Gulf. The latter channel overlays video animations of the Chicxulub asteroid crashing into Earth with images of slave ships, bringing the ongoing wake of enslavement into view: we come to think not only of oil, the environment, and climate change, but how these matters are, of course, unequally distributed across the Plantationocene’s racial lines. Shuttling between the inconceivably deep time of the prehistoric era and the presence of the now (as Walter Benjamin has it), one can only marvel, with bile in the throat, at capital’s callous endeavor to control the erupting magnitude of the Earth and the cosmos, and to so swiftly dismantle the capacious force of sixty-six million years.

In Gulf, the epistemic advantages of Brown’s natal ties to New Orleans are buttressed by a body of uncompromising study of and research on the area, much of which she has conducted as a fellow at Forensic Architecture and a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Geography at Queen Mary. Many of her works at Storefront—which are accompanied by a newsprint pamphlet detailing this research—are drawn from the deep wells of her archival and data-driven research into the history of the Gulf and the geological, ecological, and political forces that have given it its shape. For example, in They will be held to account on our terms, not theirs; in courts of law, not in non-profit boardrooms (2024), Brown visualizes her research into the network of oil rigs underneath the Gulf: painted logos from oil companies like Gulf Oil and Chevron mark the locations of each rig, while lines of black paint connect together in a matrix of corporate greed.

The most impressive manifestation of Brown’s investigatory ethos of making is Fractal catastrophes generate new solidarities (2024), which spans the entirety of the gallery’s east wall. A lesson in the bloody networks of extraction that suture the oil industry’s actions in Louisiana to a broader network of global imperialism and exploitation, the work consists of newspaper clippings from 1950 to 1971 that attest to the interlinked political gestures by which the Gulf Oil Corporation simultaneously accumulated political and financial power in Louisiana while also lending monetary support to Portuguese imperialism in Angola. The form of the work brilliantly elucidates its content: the clippings are arranged in a spiral that simultaneously evokes the cosmos and the eye of a hurricane—echoing the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, which in fact unleashed one of the largest oil spills in the history of the United States. Suggesting pedagogical proclivities, the spiral is strung together with chalk markings and pasted on a wall that evokes a blackboard.

The more quantitative registers of Brown’s inquiries are given an animate visual and sonic texture in How do you open a doorway to the other world? (2024), a seven-and-a-half-hour video work that reads data obtained during 2005 Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), for which a team of scientists dug some 2,000 feet below the Gulf’s seafloor in search of the Mississippi Canyon. Images of the core samples which IODP plumbed from the depths of earth are presented alongside buzzing webs of data visualization. These samples, many of which are millions of years old, suggest a certain geological instability, evidence that could have been used to predict and protect against future oil spills. Instead, politicians and the oil industry looked the other way.

Perhaps the other, more livable world that the title of this work suggests is the world of knowledge that the Earth has always already held in its body, those knowledges which that Western modernity has disastrously refused to heed.