Critical theorist and filmmaker, Elizabeth A. Povinelli will perform a reading about future ancestral swamps, drawing on her theories on climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe. She grounds environmental destruction within the colonial sphere, rather than within the biosphere, presenting these events as ancestral catastrophes that for centuries have affected the lived conditions of Indigenous and colonized peoples around the world. For Povinelli, ancestral catastrophes are not only in the past, but also in the present, emerging from ongoing racial and colonial violence, and extraction. Accompanying Povinelli’s reading will be a live soundscape by musician and producer, Thomas Bartlett, followed by the short film, The Family and the Zombie (2021) by The Karrabing Film Collective, of which Povinelli is a founding member. The film tells the story of a family of Indigenous Australians living in the aftermath of today’s ecological crisis.