“… art allows us to revisit and remember life by forgetting its linear narrative and by proposing the artwork’s experience as life in a more monumental dimension.”
via Chus Martinez’s text accompanying Raffaela Naldi Rossano‘s I Confess.
Category: theory
Feminist Art Coalition
Feminist Art Coalition, a platform for art projects informed by feminisms*. FAC fosters collaborations between arts institutions that aim to make public their commitment to social justice and structural change. It seeks to generate cultural awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action.
Notes on Feminisms, a series of newly commissioned essays : Saidiya Hartman – The Plot of Her Undoing .
Participating Institutions, includes Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) with My Body, My Rules, October 9, 2020–May 9, 2021. and Women Photographers International Congress, a symposium, November 19–20, 2020, led by Aldeide Delgado.
“Working collectively, various art museums and nonprofit institutions from across the United States will present a series of concurrent events—including commissions, exhibitions, performances, talks, and symposia—over the course of three months (September–November) in the fall of 2020, during the run-up to the next presidential election. This strategic endeavor takes feminist thought and practice as its point of departure and considers art as a catalyst for discourse and civic engagement.
Motivated by the ethical imperative to effect change and promote equality within our institutions and beyond, these collective projects will advocate for inclusive and equitable access to social, cultural, and economic resources for people of all genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, ages, and abilities. This cooperative effort stages a range of projects that together generate a cultural space for engagement, reflection, and action, while recognizing the constellation of differences and multiplicity among feminisms.“
Walter Rodney’s ‘Groundings’
Via Verso, On Walter Rodney‘s concept and practice of ‘Grounding’ as Critical Pedagogy by Kevin Okoth.
“A collection of public lectures held by Rodney in Jamaica and at the Congress of Black Writers in Montréal, Groundings provides a pedagogical framework for intellectuals fighting to undo the epistemological distortions of imperialism.”
“To truly ‘ground’, Rodney believed that the revolutionary intellectual must go anywhere to reason with their people. […] ‘I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of black people were prepared to sit down and listen’, he writes. ‘It might be in a sports club, it might be in a school-room, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully […] – ‘dark dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them.’ […] For Rodney, the revolutionary Black intellectual cannot hide in the university and challenge the status-quo within the boundaries of academic respectability. These intellectuals, he argued, do not pose a threat to the neo-colonial elites; only when these same intellectuals break out of academic isolation and engage in the mutual exchange of knowledge with those struggling on the ground, do they begin to challenge oppressive and exploitative systems of power.”
Liberty and Love
Maria Popova on Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mills via Adam Gopnik‘s A Thousand Small Sanities:The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.
“With an eye to the perilous erasures with which history is often rewritten — history, I continue to insist, is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance” – Popova
“Recognizing that intimate life is an accommodation of contradictions, they understood that political and social life must be an accommodation of contradictions too. The accommodation was their romance. That meant that social accommodation could be romantic, too. Love, like liberty, tugs us in different directions as much as it leads us in one. Love, like liberty, asks us to be only ourselves, and it also asks us to find our self in others’ eyes.” – Gopnik
There are echoes of blackness’s moral underpinnings, here, as found in Moten and in Glissant.
Michel Serres
1930 – 2019, lemonde, ouest-france, Parasite.
On Questions politiques, France inter.
J. Michael Dash
From this interview of J. Michael Dash with The Public Archive (2012).
You were a close friend and translator of the late Edouard Glissant. What is his enduring legacy – as a person and as an artist?
The Public Archive | Published: March 4, 2012.
I remember reading recently that prophets are often defined by what they are not. I am not saying that Edouard Glissant was a prophet but he does represent an intellectual watershed in the Caribbean intellectual landscape. For the time being though, there is a tendency to regret what he was not. There has been a rash of criticism aimed at what critics call “the late Glissant” who is seen as blindly following Deleuzean nomadology in his apolitical celebration of global creolization. Even his defenders have tried to construct him as a “warrior of the imaginary” or pointed to the various political pamphlets written with Chamoiseau before his death. I think in both cases, critics are still haunted by the example of Frantz Fanon as a model for Caribbean writing. Glissant had never felt that literature should be put in the service of political causes – certainly not in a narrow, utilitarian way. He began writing at a time when a decolonized world heralded by politically committed writing was coming into being. These new nation states were flawed and there but there was no way of imagining alternatives. This was where literature as a new mode of cognition came in. As I have written elsewhere, Glissant, from the outset, proposed that writers and thinkers should be approached and frequented like towns. He said this about Faulkner and later about the figure of Toussaint Louverture. I think his thought should be approached in this way – an urban space of diversity, open to all and facilitating various intellectual itineraries. Perhaps, in accordance with the creole saying quoted in one of the epigraphs of Caribbean Discourse, “An neg se an siec” ( a black man is a century), the Glissantian century has only just begun
Figures of note as place, which can be “frequented like towns.” Psychogeography into poetry, paraontology, and imagined reality.
A related thought, not from the interview.
“L’imaginaire de mon lieu est relié à la réalité imaginable des lieux du monde, et tout inversement.”
Edouard Glissant
Moten, Glissant
From “Geographies of Collaboration,” 2013. 20th century Congresses.
Moten speaks on self-determination and its problematic mandate for self-preservation or the protection of sovereignty.
Around 00:39:00, Moten refers to Glissant and attributes “consent not to be a single being” to him.
Glissant speaks on a lot; it is all gems.
Loitering Is Delightful
Ross Gay in the Paris Review (via twitter):
the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey.
another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time.
Source: Loitering Is Delightful
From The Book of Delights.
Some affinities to the flaneur and discourse on laziness.