
EXPLOSIVITY event at Quezada Center with Shaping San Francisco Javier Arbona-Homar
April 16 @ 7:30 pm – 8:30 pm PST

Javier Arbona-Homar will join Shaping San Francisco at the 518 Valencia: The Eric Quezada Center for Culture & Politics on Wednesday, April 16, for a talk on his new book Explosivity: Following What Remains, at 7:30 p.m. PST.
This event is free and open to the public.
Explosivity unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he analyzes a series of explosions between 1866 and 2011, Javier Arbona-Homar calls attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography, presenting a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory.
“Javier Arbona-Homar takes us through landscapes shaped by violent explosions, whose aftermath rips time and space alike. Through gripping geostories rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, he unearths the unyielding traces of racial capitalism and militarization, challenging us to think about how we remember, forget, and live with destruction. Written with the precision of a geographer and the soul of a radical artist, Explosivity is a vital guide to confronting the latent violence embedded in our environments.” —Trevor Paglen, MacArthur Fellow, artist, and author
“Explosivity blasts open how we define harm, exposing the systemic erasure of minor histories and the violent reinscription of memory in ‘afterblast’ landscapes. Organizing an unruly spatial archive of sites bearing repression and radical response, Javier Arbona-Homar experiments with decolonial practices of sensing explosivity and its consequences to defy cultural memoricide, vindicate the dead from the continuing afterlife of racial punishment and economic extraction, and create copresence and care for the scattered remains all around us.” —Shiloh Krupar, author of Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste