CK

Seminar 65 // 26, 27, 28 October 2017 // London

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Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 26-28 October 2017

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Thursday 26 October 11am-5.30pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325

11am – 1.30pm Morning session 

Introduce the new students joining us this year for the MRes and PhD.
Introduce the thematics of the year and discuss the readings.
Stefan will introduce the Reading Group’s work and will talk about the next seminar in which we will be joined by a group of colleagues and students from Luneburg University, Germany.
We will discuss the potential collaboration we have been offered by NTU, Arts Faculty, Trondheim, Norway.

1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch

2.30 – 5.39pm Afternoon session

Look through some key passages in the work of Wendy Brown (Preface & Chapter 1 of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution) and Andre Lepecki’s Singularities and try and substantiate the questions we can ask vis-a-vis ‘Breathing’.

Readings:
- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Preface & Chapter 1)
- Andre Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (Introduction & Chapter 1) 

Friday 27 October 11am-5.30pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325

11am – 1.30pm Morning session

‘The Bad Vibes Club’ in London & research into Force Feeding
Matthew de Kersaint Girardeau

The Bad Vibes Club has been running since 2014, and is variously described as: research into morbid ethics, exploring the productive possibilities of negativity, and currently as a forum for research into negative states. Over the life of the BVC I've made the description more general, and dropped 'productive' as an adjective.

It's hard to talk about the negative without being pulled into a project of rehabilitation - it's a common urge to bring the negative into discourse, spruce it up, and send it back out as the positive, and though I'm not against that (or against critique, which is a form of negative thought in itself), I also want to allow space for non-productive approaches to negativity: wallowing & revelling, morbidity and perversity.

In this session, I'll introduce the work of The Bad Vibes Club, and talk about his recent research into force feeding and relate it to the theme of breathing and oppressive institutions.

Reading:
- Terre Thaemlitz, "Becoming Minority" Guest Lecture #6

1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch

2.30 – 5.39pm Afternoon session

Hamish McPherson

I am a London-based artist who uses ideas and methods from choreography and dance to think about politics. I make workshops, non-digital games, performances, writings, images and other things in artistic, academic and community contexts. My works tends to be clusters of many smaller things rather than working up to something like a big show. Current projects include THIS MOVEMENT, using lots of different methods to look at how we (everyone) use our bodies to make politics and Configuration (Hard Care) looking at care as an aesthetic, choreographic and political practice.
My work somehow reflects my positions as a white European, ablebodied, heterosexual, cismale.

8pm – Dinner together

Saturday 28 October 12-4pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325

For the first reading group session of this year, we will be reading and discussing two texts by Lauren Berlant: 1) two brief excerpts from her book Cruel Optimism, published in 2011; 2) a short interview with Berlant from the same year, in which she discusses her own writing position as one of ‘depressive realism’. According to Berlant, ‘a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’. This succinct formula not only provides a conceptual lens through which to address contemporary conditions and relations at various levels – from the shaping of economic desires to the moulding and articulation of personal relationships under neoliberal technocapitalism. It also raises important methodological questions concerning the ways in which we can think the contemporary, or the intricate conditions of our own becoming, through an engagement with affect or, in Berlant’s words, the fact that ‘the present is perceived, first, affectively’.

Readings:
- Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Excerpts)
- Interview with Lauren Berlant, ‘Depressive Realism’

Seminar Dates: 
Wed, 25/10/2017 - 17:00 - Fri, 27/10/2017 - 22:00