The Post-Extractive Assemblies Lab is a situated research and creation apparatus conceived as a collaborative space at the intersection of practices of theory and artistic practice. It gathers around post-extractivist propositions emerging within artistic, cinematic, and research-based work, while imagining and rehearsing ways of living and organising that refuse the continual devastation of territories and communities in the name of so-called resources and development.
It emerges from an encounter—and from the desire to sustain and open that encounter—between a researcher working in environmental humanities and cinema and a designer and artist exploring more-than-human relations. It is shaped by a shared commitment to exchanging tools, methods, and sensibilities across fields of research and creation. On the one hand, a researcher increasingly compelled to develop research-based artistic practices and to work with visualisation methods; on the other, an artist-designer seeking to insist on practices of reading, writing, and theoretical research. What is at stake is both an exchange between disciplines and crafts and the creation of a space in which practices of writing, reading, and image creation continuously feed, reinforce, and unsettle one another.
Operating as a collective and process-oriented space, the Lab privileges exchange, experimentation, and critical inquiry over finished outcomes. It takes the form of a shared viewing and reading table, where participants bring ongoing projects—moving images, archival materials, photographs, texts, or conceptual propositions—into collective discussion. Through engagement with specific projects, fragments, or case studies, the Lab mobilises situatedness and specificity as methodological lenses through which broader theoretical, artistic, and cultural questions can be expanded, displaced, and rearticulated.
Open to artists, students, practitioners, and researchers from all fields, the Post-Extractive Assemblies Lab aims to cultivate a supportive space where work in progress can be shared and discussed collectively, and where theory and art practices are continuously assembled together.
This laboratory is initiated by Salomé Lopes Coelho and Ana Robles Pérez and operates within the Moving [Images] Post-Extractivism year-long programme led by Salomé Lopes Coelho, as part of the ERC project Ecologies of Violence and the Network for Environmental Humanities, Utrecht University.