Now, let me begin here;

For those of us haunted by a gaping concern with the material foundations of our societies, Unpayable Debt brings into focus a lexicon – and meditation – that complicates the singular way of knowing, seeing, and sensing that historically has shaped architectural discourse. While the materials used to build our surrounds rely on mining operations elsewhere, they lay bare the social relations under which such seemingly mundane commodities emerge. These relations are palpable in global practices and methods of governance that perpetuate systems of inequality and exploitation and extend a cosmology based on racial hierarchies, which, far too often result in displacement and dispossession of peoples, ecological collapse, economic marginalization, and death.

Central to philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva’s argument is the inseparable relation between our insatiable thirst for matter, minerals, and resources – extracted, harnessed, displaced –  and raciality. This dialectics between extraction and raciality forms the crux of her meticulous analysis of the extractive and expropriate infrastructures that nourish global capital through juridical and economic architectures of colonial and racial violence. Here, I invoke Ferreira da Silva’s concept of ‘mapping onto Blackness’ to constellate relations across oceans by stitching together histories of Blackness in a fluid cartography through multigenerational processes of racial violence. Invariably, I take her wisdom(s) as an invitation to illuminate how the materialities of our societies inherently reflect a racial regime of governance – marked by long histories of exploitation, subjugation, and the commodification of human and nonhuman bodies. These economic regimes and political systems are most often entrenched through the workings of global capital. In this present moment of planetary exhaustion, I gently extend this invitation to you to reflect on the histories etched onto our material fabrics – histories that often interweave narratives and make legible unsettling truths about the relationship between matter, race, and space.

Margarida Waco