<i>System of Systems</i>

This article discusses System of Systems ( Viala/Manicom 2023 ), a 22-minute visual narrative which I co-created with video artist Jean François Manicom. It experiments with strategies for telling time speculatively, with the aim of inviting the audience to experience the continuity and reality of deep time while inhabiting an endangered planet. I chose to move away from both the traditional methodology of the academic essay, and from that of the documentary film that prevails in impact-related academic work in the UK. The film tells the story of the Anthropocene from the perspective of transatlantic slavery, considering the latter as the inception of a model of production which combined genocide and ecocide to make profit, and contributed to the creation of a lifestyle driven by the consumption of commodities and estranged from nature. Drawing on Black feminism and decolonial ecology, the protagonist of the film understands that environmental damage became irreversible when the model of society trialled in the plantation became globalized, one in which the exploitation of human life and earth’s resources to the point of exhaustion has been the condition for continuous economic growth. Setting the story in the Plantationocene, on a Caribbean island where high levels of environmental toxicity challenge the protagonist’s views of the meaning of life and death, allowed me to contextualize sustainability, habitability, and accountability in a socio-environmental ecosystem which mirrors today’s agonizing post-industrial, fossil-fuel-addicted modes of production and consumption across the world. It also empowered me to open the debate on human extinction/survival to the broader question of making kin, through the protagonist’s reconnection with non-human figures, such as an Orisha from the Santería religion or non-vertebrate marine species of the Caribbean Sea.