It is well known that European colonists depleted West African cultural and natural resources alongside its human populations. But a story less often told is how this historical looting presaged contemporary resource extraction, driving ecological collapse. Forensic Architecture/Forensis offer their visualization tools to this story, entering through the 1897 sacking of the ‘Forest Kingdom’ of Benin by the British. Contesting Western legal contexts in which testimony is an institutionally regulated and circumscribed act, Delta-Delta: People’s Court I (2025) offers a form of transgenerational testimony that is immersive and emergent, evidentiary and generative. Through live and pre-recorded depositions, witnesses take the stand within evolving digital reconstructions of transatlantic ecologies that have been uprooted and eroded along the continuum of extractivism. Inspired by a song of the same title by Mutabaruka, The People’s Court I is the first phase of Delta-Delta, a multi-year investigation into the transatlantic petro-extractivist complex, which occupies lands and communities across the Transatlantic Forest Belt—a speculative term for a once-contiguous Pangaean forest, long ago divided into an ecological diaspora by the shift in tectonic plates. The remains of this tricontinental forest span from the ancient, sacred groves of the Niger Delta to the burial groves of Louisiana’s historically enslaved people. Now, communities from the Niger and Mississippi Deltas unite in Brazil, the third ecotone, to testify to the transtemporal death and disruption exported from ‘points of no return’ and to the intergenerational resistance that offers reparative visions of the future.

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION:

Delta-Delta: People’s Court I (2025), video, audio, 19 17＂. Courtesy of Paul Mellon Centre Conceptualized by Tobechukwu Onwukeme and Imani Jacqueline Brown. Partners include Uyilawa Usuanlele, Institute for Benin Studies, Home of Mother Earth Foundation, Museum of West African Art (Nigeria), Rise St. James, and Descendants Project (United States) Audio, video: Tobechukwu Onwukeme and Imani Jacqueline Brown, additional animation: Matteo Zamagni, video edit: Sina Salimi, project support: Alex Holding, Robert Trafford, Elizabeth Breiner, Eyal Weizman, Veronika Rau, Isabella Parlamis, and Angela Mehta Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal and adapted for Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)