Seminar 72 // 28, 29, 30 November, 1 December 2018 // London
Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 28 November – 1 December 2018
Wednesday 28 November 2 – 5pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
MRes Seminar
Irit Rogoff
The readings will be the introduction and the first chapter of Andre Lepecki’s Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. I will try and give a bit of an introduction to what Feher did with us on neoliberalism over his two year lecture series; they are connected to Lepecki’s introduction. After which we can go to the Feher panel together.
Reading:
- Andre Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, introduction & chapter 1
5 – 7pm Michel Feher: Rated Agency
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 312
Goldsmiths Lectures on the Age of Appreciation published by Zone Books
Will Davies, Michel Feher, Suhail Malik, Angela McRobbie, Louis Moreno, Emily Rosamond
The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than appreciation of their capital goods, skills, connections, and reputations.
That firms, states, and people depend more on their ratings than on the product of their activities also changes how capitalism is resisted. For activists, the focus of grievances shifts from the extraction of profit to the conditions under which financial institutions allocate credit. While the exploitation of employees by their employers has hardly been curbed, the power of investors to select investees — to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy — has become a new site of social struggle.
In clear and compelling prose, Michel Feher explains the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization. Above all, he articulates the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.
More info here.
Thursday 29 November 11am – 5pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
This will be the first of the seminars in which we will try and figure out the concept of ‘Advanced Practices’ and how to work with it. The group that I work with on this problematic, “The European Forum for Advanced Practices” has proposed an articulation of “Advanced Practices’ as follows:
"Advanced Practice is distinguished from the established academic field of Advanced Studies through questioning ideas of mastery, progressive knowledge accumulation and global research acquisition. Instead Advanced Practices favor the assertion that knowledge is not held in one place or by one group of people but is instead collaborative, granular and made up of many fields. That it encompasses conditions and lived experiences and has the capacity to rearticulate problematics and invent languages for their articulation. Therefor Advanced Practices are forms of embodied research, lived experience informed by theoretical and social knowledge, challenged by contesting speeds, defying cohesions and made by producers from different disciplines, locations, accesses and languages. Whether spurred on by ideas, by conditions, by events or by forms of creative practice - Advanced Practices always exceed the expectations that are attached to their separate components."
In the next two seminars we want to invite people who will take us through complex practices made of both different knowledges and practices and addressing different urgent issues and ask them to lay out the entire gamut of what they have done. Then the next day we will discuss what we heard and what we can learn from it in terms of developing little nodules of Advanced Practice ourselves.
Presentation: Christine Shaw, University of Toronto
Christine teaches Contemporary Art and Curatorial Studies and is the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery.
This year Christine and a group of collaborators have launched a project called ‘The Work of Wind’ which she will be laying out for us in detail. It is an exhibition, a set of discursive and performative events and a book which has just been published. In the introduction to the book the authors say "While the title might suggest a weather project, it is not about wind but of wind, of the forces of composition and decomposition predicated on the complex entanglements of ecologies of excess, environmental legacies of colonialism, the financialization of nature, contemporary catastrophism, politics of sustainability, climate justice, and resilience.
The introduction to the book edited by Etienne Turpin is below and the whole book is on our site here. Please make sure that you have read the introduction for the seminar. It is a really splendid piece of writing, one that performs its urgencies and the ex-centric path it is taking - so you will surely enjoy it.
Reading:
- Christine Shaw & Etienne Turpin. The Work of Wind: Land, Introduction.
5 – 7pm Visual Cultures Public Programme
Location: Professor Stuart Hall Building, room LG02
notes towards some notes towards an ends theory (momentations/fluctuations mix)
Adam Farah / free.yard
Adam Farah presents broad fragments of research and thoughts they are working with/through/in –which are being encompassed within the frame of what they have termed ‘ends theory’. KEYWORDS/PHRASES/CONCEPTS: moments (as theorised by Mariah Carey, diasporic technologies, disidentifications [with, time, advancements, obsolescence], cruising practises, momentations (different from moments), dwelling theories, residue, portals, ends, ends of, the ends, the end, endings - as beginnings?
Adam Farah is an artist born n raised in London. free.yard is an ongoing situational and unstable project setup to hold together in equal attention, artistic, research and curatorial lead practise//praxis - with an underlying desire to create collaborative moments for artists to connect, manifest and exhale under the weight of oppressive and supremacist structures upheld within the complacent liberal bubbles of the arts industry. free-yard.tumblr.com vimeo.com/freeyard.
Programmed by Dhanveer Singh Brar & Louis Moreno
Bleeding edges and solvent objects: racial capitalism and urban technopoetics
If the algorithmic city is an instrument of financial capital, then it represents racial capitalism’s latest spatial product, its new bleeding edge. This is something we learn from the black radical tradition: that technologies of financial accumulation presuppose spatial modes of dispossession. But according to Cedric Robinson the tradition makes another claim: that the dispossessed create ‘solvent objects’ able to dissolve the colonial hold of the metropolis.
This programme explores the work of anti-colonial poetics, and asks if an insurgent technopoetics is emerging that can confront new urban modes of domination by renewing our habits of assembly. Through a series of talks, screenings and discussions we will listen to the alienating sensuosity of sounds, take in the opaque force of images, pay close attention to the gestural, and enter into the social production of thought.
Friday 30 November 11am – 5.30pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
11am – 2pm Morning session
Through a directed discussion, we will try and unpack what we have understood from the presentation the day before, see if there are methodological principles we can start to work with and prepare questions to discuss with Christine.
2 – 3pm Lunch
3 – 5.30pm Afternoon session
Follow up discussion with Christine Shaw.
8pm Dinner together
Saturday 1 December 12-4pm
Location: Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS (closest tube: Liverpool Street Station)
Reading Group
Mariam Atieh & Siegrun Salmanian – On Somnambulism
Sleep walking halts dreams and sleep’s ability to repair the skin-ego, as Didier Anzieu explains in The Skin-Ego on one of the functions of dream. By understanding sleep walking as characteristic of the human condition of late capitalism, in which we are always walking towards disaster, alienation, and subjugation to the neoliberal model of homo oeconomicus, we would like to explore its potential.
We would like to unfold how somnambulism can be linked to the concepts of anxiety and animatedness and how these could form an approach to contemporary painting, in particular the works of Neo Rauch. Could we access these paintings through the feeling/affect they touch upon as an archive of ugly feelings: “[…] negative affects that read the predicaments posed by a general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or the social as such”, as Sianne Ngai proposes in her book Ugly Feelings?
Reading:
- Sianne Ngai, ‘Animatedness’, in: Ugly Feelings, pp 89–125