The subject matter? According to the event page, Mudede will use notes and images to discuss "a film that will connect the backyard of a home in Harare, Zimbabwe, the Atomic-Age graveyard in the Tri-Cities in Central Washington, and the collision of black holes predicted by Einstein." Some Mudede-recommended reading related to his lecture comes from a 2010 feature he wrote about a region in Washington located about three hours southwest of Seattle:
This has to be one of the strangest places on earth. The number of contradictions forced to exist together here—the Tri-Cities, the Hanford Site, the Horse Heaven Hills, the Columbia Basin—just boggles the mind.
Nowhere else in this (or any other) state will you find the most urban right next to the most rural, the most toxic below the most natural, the most global squeezed into the heart of the most local, the future we posthumans imagine and desire emerging from the most unimaginable and terrifying prehuman past. On this road over here, American Indians drive past bioinformaticians from India. On that street over there, people who can't stop worrying about how to preserve army secrets (intelligence specialists) drive past people who can't stop worrying about how to preserve the authentic sagebrush ecology (environmental activists). In some parts of the town, ranches; in other parts of the town, complexes for research programs run by the top universities in the world. In some ways, the metropolitan area is more cosmopolitan than Seattle; in other ways, it's much more closed, conservative, and patriotic. Indeed, one of the Tri-Cities, Pasco, which has a decent population —54,000 people, the 16th largest city in the state—is, according to the last United States census, 55 percent Hispanic. English is practically a second language here.
If you're not in NYC? E-flux will also be live-streaming his lecture. It takes place this Fri, April 7, 2017, at 7 p.m. (4 p.m. PST). Tune in here.
