Dear DJN Signatories, Members, and Subscribers,

Throughout this summer, we are excited to launch a three-part series of online talks and workshops highlighting design justice in practice - outside of the so called US. We’ve invited some amazing people and organizations to share about processes and knowledge that push forward our collective understandings of design justice.

We want to spotlight existing community organizing and liberatory design endeavors that we feel should be platformed, exemplifying spectrums of design justice principles.

Next week we are excited to kick this series off with Cartography of Darkness / خريطة الظلام

An online talk facilitated by Eazuka Khazrik on Thursday June 25th at:

9:30 am ‘pacific time’ (i.e. Los Angeles)
11:30 am central time (i.e. Chicago)
12:30 pm eastern time (i.e. NYC)
13:30 pm atlantic time (l.e. Puerto Rico)
18:30 pm cest (i.e. Barcelona)
19:30 pm palestine time

The talk will be offered via Zoom and folks are invited to register with this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/f1Z8qjBeQ0yfnqoMK3OAJQ

This talk will be given in both English and Arabic, with a simultaneous live English to Spanish language interpreter. Communication Access Realtime Transcription (CART) will also be provided.

We encourage folks to please take some time checking out https://dark.society.systems ahead of the talk.

An exploration of Cartography of Darkness خريطة الظلام

This dynamic talk by Eazuka Khazrik (she/her or all/all’s) explores the deep architecture of خريطة الظلام Cartography of Darkness (https://dark.society.systems), a Lebanon-based platform for counter-cartographies of liberation, launched in grief and rage on August 4th 2023.

During a more-than-critical age marked by genocidal automatism, institutionally and algorithmically produced ignorance, and a global necropolitics of indifference, the open-access + dark-access platform examines the operations of تجهيل tajhīl (the deliberate production of ignorance), تجاهل tajāhul (wilful disregard, feigned ignorance, or strategic avoidance), and تعتيم taʿtīm (systemic obscuration or suppression) as interlocking regimes of colonial erasure, separation and disempowerment.

Grounded in ancestral wisdoms that understand both the generative and dispossessive powers of “darkness”, the platform is structured through a triad of interconnected spaces: A Map, A Periodical, and A Repository, designed to foreground the inseparability of people, knowledge, and land. The Map operates as a transclusive, accretive, and sonified environment for cognitive mapping and geolocated research, as well as, an offline learning space for producing, supporting and safeguarding community maps. The Repository serves as a growing media archive probing the technopolitics of colonial expansion and ecocide, while making previously inaccessible documentary materials available through digitised personal archives that survived erasure. The Periodical publishes and translates urgent calls to action and ongoing contributions by practitioners across diverse fields of knowledge, connections to the land and forms of practice, cultivating a living ecology of connection, actionable solidarity and shared inquiry that resists the disciplinary organisation of knowledge as taught by and structured within militarised academia and capitalist labor processes

*Image title: Cartography of Liberation - Eazuka Khazrik*
Image description: An image based in purple, with text elements written in neon green in Arabic and English. There are three hearts stenciled in neon green at the center of the image. The central text in English reads “the counter-cartography of liberation begins in the collective shadow of our imagination.” Underneath, is written - “solidarity is sacrifice”

Introducing the Facilitator - Eazuka Khazrik!

Eazuka Khazrik(she/her or all/all’s) nurtures a plural, liberatory practice. Working across a multiplicity of spaces and constellations that engage with locally entrenched universalisms and plural philosophies of intelligence, her work is guided by a trans-millennial production of knowledge that refuses to separate people from knowledge and the land. While probing the unity of science and the multi-dimensionality of experience in an accelerated age that automates ignorance, her practice revolves around the collective search and need for polymathic resonance and collective healing in the 20th-21st centuries and long-term future. Her work has been presented, performed, exhibited and published internationally, conjoining indigenous science with art, medicine, law and computation.

She is a member of the Agricultural Movement in Lebanon and the initiatress of the techno-study group ‘قراءة الحواسيب READING COMPUTERS’, the peer-to-peer platform and study;strategy;solidarity group ‘POST-CORONIALISM’, the online transclusive research platform ‘خريطة الظلام CARTOGRAPHY OF DARKNESS‘; the open alliance AATMA ✦ عتمة, and the ancestral reading circles of Astrorevolt. Having grown up around a quarry contaminated with military and toxic waste, she has been active in struggles for environmental justice since early adolescence. Khazrik has been initiated into Kaldayuthq/astrology by her Chaldean grandmother at the age of 10, holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University(LB) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT(US) where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace Prize. She is of Lebanese, Chaldean Iraqi, Armenian and Indian descent, is raised and based in Lebanon and teaches internationally.

Folks are encouraged to follow the work at IG: @cartographyofdarkness

To support the continuation of Dark Society Systems independent community-funded work, folks might contribute at: https://buy.stripe.com/fZu8wJa8Ae4V38y79Ed3i05