Beyond Carbon is an immersive screening that transports viewers to an Indigenous Dayak village in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Created in collaboration with village elders, women, and youth, Beyond Carbon represents community-owned knowledges that do not leave a trace in our existing forest data infrastructures. A multi-sensory dialogue between earth observation data, animated myths, oral history, and everyday practices showcases the need for 'rewilding' scientific/datafied knowledges about our landscapes with the lived knowledges of forest dwellers. 

Viewers will encounter a tropical rainforest ecosystem that is one of the planet’s richest biodiversity areas—but one increasingly under threat from mining, palm oil, and carbon offset plantations. What kinds of data are used to represent a place? What worldviews do these datafications represent?  How can we confront the colonial legacy of extractivism to finally put differently situated knowledges in conversation with one another? What emerges in the 18-minute screening through interviews, animated retellings of Indigenous myths, forest sounds, and data visualizations of forest carbon are negotiations between two value systems—one that relies on numbers to measure the rainforest's ability to sequester carbon and another that understands the forest as an extension of community. 

For more details about Beyond Carbon, a transnational initiative founded to counter forest data infrastructures with community-owned knowledges of landscapes, explore here

Speakers

Madhuri Karak is the founder of & research lead at Beyond Carbon. She is a researcher working at the intersections of climate, technology, and people's movements in South and South East Asia for the last 15+ years. She writes, teaches, and speaks on topics ranging from Indigenous data sovereignty and the environmental impacts of tech infrastructures to the limits of geospatial tools for territorial recognition.

Cindy Julianty is the advocacy lead at Beyond Carbon. She is a community land rights activist and lawyer currently focusing on climate, territorial recognition, and biodiversity conservation. Cindy represents both BRWA, Indonesia’s Ancestral Domain Registration Agency (Badan Registrasi Wilayah Adat), and the Indonesia chapter of the Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCA) Consortium.

Michelle Cheripka is the creative lead at Beyond Carbon. She is a queer producer and director for multimedia projects. Michelle’s work focuses on personal experiences of systemic issues. She works with environmental non-profits, and has experience with tv series, commercials, documentaries, Facebook Live series, and feature films.

Moderator

Diana Suhardiman is director of KITLV and endowed professor of Natural Resource Governance, Climate and Equity at Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University. Her most recent research looks at grassroots climate governance in Southeast Asia, where she focuses on the politics of knowledge (re)production, cultural (dis)continuity, and agency shaping in distinct yet interrelated socio-ecological systems.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 26 November from 15.30–17.00 PM (CET).  

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Beyond Carbon.