Geopower (intro) — a place of their own

Geopower

A concept productive for us across different projects is geopower - or the forces of the earth itself - which allows us to comprehend and conceptualise the geo (earthly, material, affect, power) and the human (bio, anthropic, biopolitics, body, power) together in specific ways.
Geopower as a concept is developed by the writer Elizabeth Grosz (following some of Foucault’s work) and further elaborated and explored by Kathyrn Yusoff.

Geopower and Eile
Through the Eile Project we aim to diffractively (Karen Barad) work with the notion of geopower in the practice of border-fictioning, employing performance with audio-visual mythopoesis to enact and enable different understandings and experiences of the border. In so doing, an expanded range of agencies are permitted to play a part in the construction and maintenance of border-thinking - that are intentionally more open to different forces, both geologic and anthropic. Eile manifests as an engine of difference through her performances; a medium through which bodies (those channeled through the character Eile, as well as non/inhuman bodies) join forces with the earth to enter into new intensities and durations.

Geopower / Self-organisation Against Injustice
We gave the title to a small project at Orgreave in Sheffield, at the site of the former Orgreave Coking Plant (and the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the miners strike of 1984) in which we explored different forms of self-organisaed resistance and solidarity to police brutality and injustice in relation to mining and shale gas fracking. See more here ︎︎︎