– Artist’s Pluriversal Ledger

Samuel Onalo + Dani Admiss

What would it mean to orient practices away from extractive regimes and engage with land, labour, and access relations of those that we are accountable to?

Worldwide, migrant, majority ethnic, and subaltern artists are disproportionately impacted by multiple intersecting present and past pressures directly linked to the climate emergency. Structural injustices, colonial power relations, and an increasing wealth and inequality gap are entangled with ecological collapse, state failure, migration and pandemic recovery.

The Artist’s Pluriversal Ledger is a thought experiment and essay exploring the fragmented realities of cultural policy, intersectional equity and climate breakdown. As a speculative inquiry it works to mobilise this fabric of relations, pulling the spaces between them together, to imagine what is needed to begin to heal colonial wounds of climate emergency and energy transitions for artists worldwide, at the same time strengthening accountability and community bonds. 

The project employs the architecture of the Virtual Private Blockchain (VPBC). Designed by Samuel Onalo, the VPBC is a semi-private encrypted ledger system that allows for various scales of public-private relations. It is used here to conceive of a decentralised anticolonial system that can manage, regulate, protect, encourage, support, facilitate and care for the interconnectedness of artist’s struggles.