Seminar 73 // 17, 18, 19 January 2019 // London
Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 17 – 19 January 2019
Thursday 17 January 11am – 4.45pm
Location: Ben Pimlott Building, room 506
Noémie Solomon: Anachoreographies
Choreography is a field under transformation: one could map, over the last two decades, its hybridizations with other artistic disciplines, its migrations toward different fields of knowledge, its inflections of a series of social and political issues. This seminar on anachoreographies is twofold. First, we survey key events and notions that are constitutive of the choreographic field, from the coining of the term in 1700 as a system of dance notion, to its shifting relation with issues of language and technique, expression and affect, kinesthetic empathy and sex. On the other, we examine contemporary interdisciplinary practices that swallow and reroute the histories and technologies of the choreographic. We look at how these anachoreographies run with and yet against the grain of traditions of choreography, as many minor gestures that undo predictable, regulated, and essentialized dispositions. Faced with the dissolution of a stable paradigm of knowledge and subjectivity, the task of interdisciplinary choreographic practices is not only to speculate and experiment toward what is possible, but toward what is necessary: the new ethical roles and functions for dancers in denaturalizing the choreographies of fascism, racism, and misogyny.
Noémie Solomon is a dance and choreography theorist, and course leader of the Institute in Curatorial Practice in performance, Wesleyan University.
Readings:
- Gurur Ertem, “The Gezi Uprising and Corporeal Politics: Towards the Reinvention of Political Culture,” SCORES 5 intact bodies / under protest (2016): 14-23.
- André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of the Performance (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1-18.
5 – 7pm Visual Cultures Public Programme
Location: Professor Stuart Hall Building, room LG02
Series organised by Lorenzo Pezzani and Nishat Awan
Hostile Environments
(in collaboration with the Migration research Network)
Nadine El-Enany & Yasmin Gunaratnam
Friday 18 January 11am – 5pm
Location: Ben Pimlott Building, room 506
11am – 1pm Morning session
Through a directed discussion, we will try and unpack what we have understood from Noémie's presentation the day before, and see if there are methodological principles we can start to work with.
1 – 2pm Lunch
2 – 5pm Joint session with Choreographic (Art Department)
CHOREOGRAPHIC 11: Noémie Solomon in conversation with Julie Cunningham and Jamila Johnson-Small.
In conversation with Noémie Solomon, Cunningham and Johnson-Small will discuss their choreographic practices against questions of language, structure, and technique; movement and collaboration. Through performance excerpts and discussions, we will examine the choreographic as it secretes and organizes the social body, while attending to the singular ways in which dance can articulate unexpected thoughts, affects, and modes of relation.
CHOREOGRAPHIC was initiated by Edgar Schmitz in 2016 as a way of collaborating with invited guests from the fields of choreography and (post-)dance on one-off productions at the intersection of artistic, curatorial and discursive labour. CHOREOGRAPHIC is concerned with the organisation of movement, the nature of composite productions, and the affordances of infrastructural form, and stages choreographic modes, language games, and production formats in close and conflictual dialogue with neoliberal forms of governance and subsumption to animate their invariably compromised critical affordances. The series is generously supported by Mountain of Art Research, Goldsmiths. More info here.
Readings:
- Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind (1978)
- Interview with Jamila Johnson-Smalls, "Different Angles”, AQNB (2018)
- Jenn Joy, “Atmospheric Accumulations”, BOMB (2018)
6 – 8pm The Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture 2019
Location: Whitehead Building, Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
Jodi Dean: Capitalism is the end of world
Mark Fisher is often credited for Fredric Jameson’s remark, “it’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” It’s right that the credit go to Mark, because his account of capitalist realism confronts us with capitalism’s unbearable yet unavoidable horrors. From the genocidal destruction of settler colonialism, through industrial production’s demolition of cultures and modes of life, to planet-altering anthropogenic climate change, capital subsumes the world. We can easily imagine the end to the world because under capitalism most of us confront it, in ways conscious and unconscious, every day as we are forced to choose our exploitation, dispossession, and confinement. Thinking with Mark, this talk will salvage possibilities of communist desire from the ruins of everyday life. It will focus on the end of comradeship, the different ways we lose our comrades. The fact of an end should not forestall beginning.
Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and author of numerous books including, The Communist Horizon and Crowds and Party.
The Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture is hosted by the Department of Visual Cultures annually in January. Each time, a speaker will be invited to engage with the themes and ideas written about by Mark with an eye to taking them further or, indeed, somewhere else.
The event is free. No booking is required. All are welcome! More info here.
Saturday 19 January 12 – 4pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 343
Reading Group: Report on things (and non-things)
Led by Dennis Dizon, Murat Adash, and Ofri Cnaani
We will be reading, side by side, two short texts from Brazilian writers Clarice Lispector and Vilém Flusser. Through these two formally inventive short pieces, we will discuss a set of constantly shifting relations between the Thing and the Non-Thing as they depart from the Ordered World (a fundamental order of every thing) into an Entangled one.
We will begin with a short exercise to access ideas from and questions about the reading, relying on the "choreographic" framework to look at the moment of the displacement of the Thing, out of and in(-) formation as a state (of being and thinking). Together, we hope to identify possibilities of thinking when the Thing slowly collapses out of order, recomposing into another and becoming “impossible to get a hold on."
Readings:
- Clarice Lispector, 'Report on the Things', translated from Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, New Directions, 2017.
- Vilem Flusser, 'The Non-Thing 1', in The Shape of Things A Philosophy of Design, Reaktion Books, London, 1999, p. 85-89.