K(not) is a major new artistic project that discusses the impacts of ecological justice and climate colonisation on diasporic and first nations communities, addressing their effect at a local and global level. The k(not) project reflects upon the way climate change will and has already created major public health impacts for our communities and provides a platform to undertake slowed-down and more expansive thinking in order to seek alternative strategies to our current crisis that incorporates food and land sovereignty alongside greater reflection upon the ongoing racialised violence that is inherent within climate colonisation itself.

As Rob Nixon writes in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, slow violence is a ‘violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’ As Nixon notes, climate change and many of the most catastrophic environmental challenges we are encountering today face significant representational challenges due to the uneven and often invisible pace at which they unfold within the scope of human perception. This presents a unique challenge for visual culture to make knowable something that is beyond our perception.

The project has a number of different arms in its 2022 iteration, including a year-long artist development program for artists of workshops and discussions with artists and activists working in this intersection; an online platform with commissioned writings and resources by artists, writers and researchers; and lastly a speculative dinner that focuses on food futures in relation to food sovereignty in Naarm.