ABOUT THE BOOK
In And Salt the Earth Behind, Soul Miles contends with Eugenics as an archival and designerly practise. Darwin's grand revelation of an ‘evolution by Natural Selection’ inspired in others, its inverse, an artificial selection. Eugenics, a designed claim to the future of humanity, one shaped by acidic and belligerent views of what ‘the fittest person’ looks and sounds like.
Eugenics was to biology as the atomic bomb is to physics; its defining contribution and darkest hour, violence at SCALE, and indeed violence that finds its apotheosis in the forties, yet still hangs high over our heads today. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.
Using expansive notions of both ‘design’ and ‘archives’ the project attempts to offer defensible positions from which we can identify Eugenics in its contemporary guises and disguises and from there, dismantle the grotesque logics at play.
And Salt the Earth Behind: Designerly Violence & the Eugenic Archive was published in January 2025 by the UCL Prejudice in Power Programme.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Expect a short panel with Kaiya Waerea, researcher and lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths and the opportunity to ask questions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Soul Miles is a Quirk Creative Fellow at the IAS and the UCL School of Creative and Cultural Industrie. He is a writer and designer whose work investigates the inevitable politics of technology and the evitable technologies of politics.
