Literary Interventions at the Spore Library

Registration required: mariela.n@spore-initiative.org

Please register only if you can attend at least three sessions. 

All sessions are held in English. If necessary, we help each other with translations.

LITERARY INTERVENTIONS #1

River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation

November 3, 2026 
5 – 7 pm

Our first session will focus on River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, edited by Nuzhat Abbas.

What can language reveal about the bodies and territories it passes through, and about the histories of power, war, and displacement it carries with it? This collection of essays invites us to think of translation not simply as the movement of words between languages, but as a practice entangled with power, memory, and lived experience.

Many of us are not professional translators, yet we move between languages every day, negotiating different identities, memories, and ways of belonging. Together, we will explore translation as both a political and intimate practice, asking what languages make possible, what they obscure, and how they can become tools for imagining new forms of relationship across differences.

LITERARY INTERVENTIONS #2

The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives 

November 17, 2026 
5 – 7 pm

The second session of Literary Interventions will focus on The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives by Macarena Gómez-Barris.

How do extractive economies shape not only landscapes, but also social relations, political institutions, and everyday life? Drawing on decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, and environmental thought, Gómez-Barris argues that extraction is never just an environmental issue: it is a mode of organizing power. Extractive regimes produce racialized and colonial forms of dispossession, deciding which territories, bodies, and ways of knowing count as expendable. Against this, the book turns to practices of inhabiting and caring for land rooted in Indigenous presence, collective memory, and more-than-human relations that refuse this extractive logic.

Together, we will explore extraction as both a political and everyday question, asking what it treats as expendable, what practices exceed its logic, and what other ways of relating to land and to one another these practices make possible.

LITERARY INTERVENTIONS #3

Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization 

November 24, 2026 
5 – 7 pm

This session of Literary Interventions will be dedicated to Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. 

What does it mean to practice decolonization beyond institutions, official narratives, or academic frameworks? Drawing on Aymara thought and decades of political activism, Rivera Cusicanqui challenges dominant understandings of coloniality and decolonization, arguing that these are lived through everyday practices, relationships, and ongoing struggles. At the heart of the book is the Aymara concept of ch'ixi, which describes the coexistence of differences without dissolving them into a single identity.

Following the book's invitation to think of contradiction not as a problem to solve but as a way of thinking and living, we will reflect on what these ideas offer for understanding identity and coexistence and discuss how they resonate with our own experiences and ways of relating to others. 

LITERARY INTERVENTIONS #4

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals  

Dezember 1, 2026 
5 – 7 pm

This session of Literary Interventions turns to Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. 

What can the social lives of marine mammals tell us about survival under conditions of violence and displacement? Drawing on Black feminist theory and close observation of whales, dolphins, manatees, and seals, Gumbs reads their forms of communication, collective care, and adaptation as a framework for thinking about resistance, kinship, and embodiment. The book moves between marine biology, memory, and political reflection, treating the ocean as a site where questions of gender, race, and survival can be rethought outside familiar human frameworks.

Together, we will discuss what this approach makes visible or obscures, how it relates to other decolonial and feminist critiques we have encountered in this cycle, and what it means to draw political thought from other-than-human life.