Neocolonialism, Extraction and the Cracked Mirror of Capitalism

This event brings together two short talks (20mins each) and a film (65mins) that interrogate how capitalism and its colonial legacies continue to shape our relationship with the planet, technology and each other. Across Latin American geopolitics, digital culture, and collective art-making, the speakers and artists explore how extractivism - of resources, data and human attention - drives both climate breakdown and social alienation. Each contribution asks what alternatives might emerge if we rethink our systems of production, ownership and imagination.

Erika Teichert – Neocolonialism and Extractivism in Latin America (20 minute talk)

Erika Teichert examines the struggle for climate justice and a just energy transition through the lens of Latin American resource politics. She argues that the region’s history of colonial exploitation - its gold, silver and agricultural wealth fuelling the rise of modern capitalism - continues today in new “green” forms. The global demand for lithium, copper and other materials essential to renewable technologies reproduces old patterns of dependency and dispossession. From a Latin American perspective, climate change and capitalism are inseparable from this neocolonial frontier, where promises of sustainability mask continued extraction and inequality. Achieving climate justice, Teichert suggests, requires confronting not only carbon emissions but the power structures that decide whose lands and futures are expendable.

Tim Kindberg – Cracked Mirror (20 minute talk)

Tim Kindberg connects ecological collapse and the rise of artificial intelligence, identifying capitalism as the common driver behind both. The relentless pursuit of profit externalises environmental damage - carbon emissions, habitat loss, and water depletion - while social and digital systems mirror these extractions in the psychic realm. Under capitalism’s “spectacle,” people are paralysed by the distorted reflections produced by AI and social media: a cracked mirror that fragments collective agency. Kindberg asks whether wisdom and empowerment could return if we shifted our gaze from the virtual to the natural - from algorithmic feeds to parts of nature where we can feel, explore, and see ourselves more clearly. His work is both diagnosis and invitation: to recover forms of attention and connection that capitalism’s digital machinery erodes.

Close and Remote – We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (65 minute film screening)

Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter’s film project takes Mark Fisher’s ideas on capitalist realism and collective consciousness and reimagines them through participatory practice. Built collaboratively through Instagram posts and public interaction, the film uses the monetised, algorithmic platforms of communicative capitalism against themselves. Working without institutional funding, contracts or hierarchies, We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher becomes a “de-capitalised” artwork—an experiment in shared authorship and mutual creation. It embodies Fisher’s call for new collective imaginaries, suggesting that even within capitalism’s digital infrastructures, alternative forms of making and relating can emerge. The project transforms the tools of extraction - social media’s data-mining engines - into instruments of collective expression.

Together, these two talks and film screening expose capitalism’s extractive logic operating across environments, technologies and cultures. From the mines of the Andes to the click and follows on media, they reveal how the same systems that exploit the Earth also colonise the imagination. Yet each also points toward resistance: toward decolonial thinking, reconnection with nature, and collaborative creativity as ways to envision life beyond extraction.

Access

The venue is wheelchair accessible with a lift to Cinema 2 and level access into the cinema. There are accessible toilets. There is a hearing loop in the cinema. Full access details are available on the Watershed website.

‘Neocolonialism, Extraction and the Cracked Mirror of Capitalism’ is part of a wider talk programme organised by the Personal to the Planetary fellows - a group of ten activists, academics, artists and scientists who have spent ten months collaboratively researching the climate emergency. Personal to the Planetary is a joint Brigstow Institute and Cabot Institute for the Environment initiative.

Erika Teichert is a researcher with interests in visual culture and environmental justice.

Tim Kindberg is a writer and digital creative interested in imagined futures.

Close and Remote are artists Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter.

About this event series

The From the Personal to Planetary talk series is co-produced and co-hosted by the Brigstow Institute, Cabot Institute for the Environment, creative associates Close and Remote and our 10 Personal to Planetary Fellows. This series is running during COP30, the biggest annual conference of negotiations for the future health of our planet. Find out more about COP30 and what the University of Bristol will be doing there.

You might also be interested in the other talks in this series:

· 13 November:

· 15 November:

· 16 November:

· 19 November:

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Host or Publisher Brigstow Institute, University of Bristol