In her talk, Jumana Manna will speak about her dual practice as a sculptor and a filmmaker, and her ongoing inquiries into the contradictions of preservation and ruination. Manna will focus on her recent film, Foragers, which depicts the criminalization of Palestinian plant foraging traditions. The film challenges the logic of extinction debates under settler-colonial and neoliberal regimes, namely the…
Culture is rooted in connection to land; like land, culture cannot be contained. I am inspired by generations of Lingít & Unangax̂ creative production and knowledge connected to the land I belong to. From this perspective I engage across cultures with contemporary conditions. My process of creation is a constant pursuit of freedom and vision for the present and future….
A talk about hosts, ghosts, hospitality, hostility, and the complicated nature of a good time. In this lecture, Rakowitz will discuss (g)hosting, a term he uses to explore the intersection of hospitality and hostility in his work, as well as the recuperation of disappeared objects, smells, tastes, customs, and relationships through reactivations and substitutes.
This talk will focus on the work of Ecotone: Chagras, Payaos, Camellones, a program curated by Juliana Steiner as part of the as part of Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food. By investigating and honoring food sovereignty and distinct foodways, Ecotone explores some examples of restorative and regenerative agricultural technologies in Colombia. The commissioned…
Governments in South Africa and beyond are working to ratify new laws that limit and criminalize seed access and use. In response, a local and global resistance movement is working to keep seeds free and accessible. The idea of freedom is inherent to a seed, its very purpose is to share itself as widely as possible to ensure the continuity…
By understanding our art as a being with whom we create a relationship, Layli Long Soldier explores the ways in which we can make commitments and agreements with our writing and art; uphold expectations and enact reciprocity, as one would do with a relative; and nourish our relationship through pleasure, playfulness, or enjoyment. These agreements with our art, in turn,…
For decades, well-meaning journalists and cultural workers used a humanizing framework in their representation of oppressed people, in hopes of countering the traditional portrayal of the Palestinian as a “terrorist.” Within this framework, a perfect victimhood emerged as an ethnocentric prerequisite for sympathy and solidarity, often over-emphasizing oppressed people’s nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilities. In “Bombs, women, children, etc.”: Humanization,…
In Taking (A)part: Human Rights, Human Rites and “Human Writes,” Kendall Thomas revisits “Human Writes,” a 2005 performance-installation about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on which he collaborated with the choreographer William Forsythe and The Forsythe Company. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall once argued that in the arts “things get said in ways in which they can’t get said…
How do we exist in complexity and contradiction? Can we mourn and celebrate all at once? In a world focused on binaries, where do we find power on the edges? In this talk, Bhenji speaks to the beauty of everything at once, of finding meaning between practices, bridging bodies and islands of knowledge together in order to expand our potential…
What is “gore capitalism” and how does it turn into “snuff politics” in the borderlands between Tijuana and San Diego? In answering those questions, Sayak Valencia discusses examples of audiovisual devices and virtual social networks that challenge the regime of truth through what she calls “the livestreaming regime.” Her talk considers how the contemporary body has become a platform for…
How does a writer find her voice? And how does she locate herself among the power structures that operate in the world around her? Drawing on her own work, Githa Hariharan examines the writer’s struggle to enlarge the small space occupied by an individual life. She describes the project of giving voice to a mosaic of voices and their multiple…
Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents ‘Natq’, a live audiovisual essay on the politics and possibilities of reincarnation. Through listening closely to “xenoglossy” (the impossible speech of reincarnated subjects), this performance explores a collectivity of lives who use reincarnation to negotiate their condition at the threshold of the law—people for whom injustices and violence have escaped the historical record due to colonial…
Fusco will discuss the recent efforts by “artivists” in Cuba to advocate for expanded expressive freedoms and civil rights. She will focus primarily on the activities of the 27N group and the San Isidro Movement.
An analysis of several musical and literary texts by Mashrou Leila, as sites for negotiating the discursive boundaries of gender construction in the public sphere, and an attempt to frame the work within ongoing conversations about the limits of representation as a mode of political engagement.
The photographers discussed share a forensic dialogue with photography’s past and offer navigational tools for its future possibilities in the making of new identities and histories. We need to keep open cultural portals in which to discuss the application of photography as a vehicle for self-determination, remaking histories, and visual forms of resistance. The aim is a visual voyage through the…
Just because we’re born with a vagina, why accept that our family, society, and state continue treating us as unequal ‘beings’? Why sexual violence, unequal rights, and inequities persist? Why do we need to rethink and re-imagine intersections of gender, caste, class and religion? I plan to reflect on insights from my journey of resisting and interrogating complex politics of…
In this presentation, Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani will discuss the nature of contemporary borders and the ever-shifting modalities of border violence. Drawing on their work within the Forensic Oceanography project since 2011, which has focused on the Mediterranean frontier, they will discuss the strategies they have used to document traces of violent events and seek accountability for them. Reflecting…
Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was a co-compiler of the document, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and is part of an advisory group, with Reuben Roqueni, Lori Pourier, Ronee Penoi, and Vallejo Gantner – developing a First Nations Performing Arts Network
In a time of lockdown and quarantines, of fascism and propaganda, we need reason and action to be supported by visions of change. Cassils discusses artistic and performative tactics uniquely suited for our time. Reflecting on ten years of practice where they carve out strategies for trans representation, they discuss tactics to educate, engage and agitate while attempting to balance…
This lecture will be (again) a dialogue with the ruins I inherited from my fathers, guided by the poet’s voice:
I would come to that country, my country, and I would say to it:
“Kiss me without fear… And if I do not know what to say, it is still for you that I speak. “
The ~cultural sector~ has been resistant to change, it has held on to antiquated balances of power like no other area of society, and that rigidity has affected the way we distribute resources amongst ourselves within the creative industry. We have got to radically restructure the way we do things. If we had the chance to terraform the arts landscape…
