Article:

Agropoetics of the Black Atlantic

The installation Chorus of Soil by the Senegalese-Italian artist Binta Diaw connects the history of the transatlantic slave trade with the current exploitation of migrants in agriculture. The medium of this connection is the slave ship, whose architectural layout is recreated with small mounds of earth. Seedlings sprout from these small mounds, and with them the possibility of a future in the past of colonial-capitalist regimes, and in the present of plantationoscenes. Drawing from Diaw’s work, the paper explores the question of the extent to which the seed is an Afrofuturistic technology whose imaginative power allows soil to become perceptible as an infrastructure of care.