Overland, There's Shorter Time to Dream

Abstract

The low pressures in the atmosphere over the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts create windy conditions in the area during late winter and early spring. Loose top soils are picked up by westerly winds, pulling these sands into an increasingly intense Asian dust storm. Freezing all activity in its path, these storms have become an annual occurrence in western China, compared to half a century ago when each phenomenon struck only once every seven or eight years. Their movements have become an increasing threat to the bourgeoning infrastructural projects of the Belt and Road Initiative which stretch across their paths. In this talk and discussion, we begin from inside the dust storm. It is here where we learn how geographies that have long appeared in the peripheries of popular imagination, have been central in the formation of supply chain capitalism—contingent upon state support, concentration and monopolization of capital power, and the organization of weather and the environment itself. Such 'random acts of violence' brought by these storms call for an urgent need to shift our common-sense understandings and contemporary culture in ways which are both imaginary and epistemological. While the Belt and Road imaginary evokes a liquid and mobile world of commodity exchange, its political infrastructures are generating closures as much as openings, stasis as much as flow. These new geometries mark not only the geopolitical reorganization of goods, people, capital, and ideas, but also forms of resistance expressed through movements, grain by grain. The symposium will draw on Solveig’s documentary-led research into the New Silk Road, mapping these constellations through interviews, field recordings, found WeChat videos with excerpts from her documentary AAA Cargo (2018).