Event Description
While everyone is witnessing the impacts of climate change, in many regions of the world people are losing their homes, livelihoods, culture and lives. It is not enough to recognise that climate change is accelerating. Climate change is one of the greatest drivers of injustice the world has ever seen.
In AMUK, Indonesian writer and artist Khairani Barokka performs a new, archipelago-futurist piece on environmental and climate crises as the result of centuries of colonial extractivism. Through the colonial histories leading to the mistranslation of the Malay/Indonesian word ‘amuk’ into ‘amuck’, and the phrase ‘running amuck’, these words are imagined as characters in literal dialogue with and against each other.
This specially commissioned poetry performance from Khairani Barokka builds on questions of climate policy and finance to tell the story – a story, our story, the story of our earth. Through her work and in conversation with Chitra Ramaswamy, Khairani Barokka will shift our understanding of the climate crisis from an external clash of nature and humanity to an internal struggle of behaviours, histories, cultures and ethics.
Speaker Biographies
Khairani Barokka
Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, Khairani Barokka is a writer, poet and artist in London. She’s a practice-based researcher, whose work centres disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. Among her honours, she was Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, the first non-British Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow, and is currently UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation and Research Fellow at University of the Arts London.
Chair: Chitra Ramaswamy
Chitra Ramaswamy is a journalist and author. Her latest book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship, published by Canongate in April 2022, is a work of creative non-fiction exploring her friendship with a 98-year-old German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga. Her first book, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy, published by Saraband in April 2016, won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize. She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble, and Message From The Skies. She is a TV critic for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, and broadcasts for BBC radio. She lives in Edinburgh with her partner, two young children and rescue dog.
Please note this is a hybrid event. This event will be live-captioned.
Please note this event will be photographed and images may be used for future marketing, promotional or archive purposes. If you would prefer not to be photographed please let us know at the event.