Seminar 55 // 28, 29, 30 Jan 2016 // London

Program for Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar No 3, 2015-16

Thursday, 28 January 2016, 11am – 5pm

Location: Prokofiev Room, Rutherford Building (Library)

11am – 5pm:

Presentation by C/K participant Leire Vergara (C/K PhD Candidate)

Leire will introduce the final stage of her thesis after having produced a specific curatorial project in Morocco in relation to her research on the plazas de soberanía (‘places of sovereignty’): empty occupied enclaves scattered across the northern Moroccan coast which have functioned as territories of exception throughout the periods of Spanish colonialism, decolonisation and postcolonialism in the area. The project Dispositifs of Touching: Curatorial Imagination in the Time of Expanded Borders was initiated by the curator and conducted in collaboration with Trankat Résidence d’artistes en Médina de Tétouan. The project consisted in a reading group and a series of ephemeral documentary materials on the plazas, produced for the occasion by invited artists. The reading group was developed out of a series of reading sessions focusing on the vocabulary that nourished Vergara’s practice-based PhD research. The documentary materials were produced through visits to the most reachable locations close to the enclaves.

Readings:
- Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma, ‘Curating Sociology’
- Félix Guattari, ‘La Borde: A Clinic Unlike Any Other’

Lunch Break: 1.30–2.30pm

Thursday, 28 January 2016, 5–7pm
Location: Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG02

Curating and the Event of Knowledge
Julia Morandeira (Madrid) & Doreen Mende (Geneva)

Part of the Visual Cultures Public Programme Series ‘Permissions – The Way We Work Now’ (curated by Irit Rogoff, Manuel Ramos and Susan Schuppli):

As boundaries dissolve between teaching, researching and articulating concerns, as definitions of practice expand and mutate – we wish to pay attention to the permissions granted us by such changes. How do we currently define our subjects and methods as invention and necessity join forces within our work? As we self-institute and self-authorize in the face of new formats of research, study and practice – how do our permissions come about, are they immanent to fields of study or authorised by the urgent issues of the day?

Friday, 29 January 2016, 11am – 6pm

Location: Prokofiev Room, Rutherford Building (Library)

11am – 2pm:

Bridget Crone (Dept. of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, Curator and writer). Bridget will present a recent curatorial project entitled ‘Swamps and Stages’.

2–3pm: Lunch Break

3–5pm:

Doreen Mende, Director of CCC HEAD Geneva, Doreen completed her PhD in C/K in 2014. She has curated numerous projects and will present ‘Double Economy'.

8pm: Dinner together

Saturday, 30 January 2016, 12–4pm

Location: Raven Row (56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS; closest tube: Liverpool Street Station)

Reading Group – chaired by Johnny Herbert (PhD C/K), Karthik Kuduva Gopinath (MRes C/K), and Manuela Villa Acosta (MRes C/K)

“…Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else.”
(Jacques Derrida – Specters of Marx, p. 57)

“To disregard ‘knowing how’ in favor of ‘knowing that’ is to discount evidence of dispositional activity as unknowable, simply because it is seen to be indeterminate or impossible to formalize.”
(Keller Easterling – ‘Disposition’, Cognitive Architecture. From Biopolitics to Noopolitics, p. 254)

In the previous C/K meeting we touched upon Mark Fisher’s claims that we are ‘precorporated into’ and ‘colonised by’ capitalist culture. Speculatively modulating these terms into a consideration of ‘possession’ and a claim that we, and our surroundings, are possessed by ‘spirits of our time’, how can we ‘counter’ when possessed and engulfed by things seemingly disposed towards maintaining our possession? We will attempt to grapple with this condition we may well be in by way of a constellation of sources and ideas: Thinking mimicry as both resistance and reverence in the Hauka possession rituals in Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous; Keller Easterling’s conception of infrastructural ‘disposition’ and the active forms as capable of embodying discrepancies and slippery, undeclared forms of power; and Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the difficulties of coming to terms with ghosts we invoke, a difficulty he asserts we share with Marx.

Readings/Viewings:
- Jacques Derrida, Excerpt from 'Specters of Marx'
- Keller Easterling, ‘Disposition’
- Jean Rouch, Les Maîtres Fous, www.veoh.com/watch/v14179347tanDtaPa