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At this IHR roundtable, Tina Campt, J .T. Roane and Kathryn Yusoff will share their collective work on gravity, environment and race. April 29

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Revolution is not a one-time event

WE SEE THE HORIZON: ABOLITION NOW!

Abolition is a perennial and open invitation to take the potential of revolutionary love seriously. In direct opposition to carcerality, abolition is a life-making principle: one concerned with creating new practices, spells and rhythms that make planetary life habitable for all. Abolition is the desire for more; a rejection of all the tenets of the world sustained by the catastrophe of policing, carcerality and their rootedness in anti-Black, anti-queer, anti-trans, white heteropatriarchal, racial capitalist state power. As this moment of upheaval unfolds, abolition has taken centre stage, expanding the realm and threshold of potential. This state of emergency has always been forever. Abolition reminds us that the world has never been habitable and that everything is possible.

In daring us to demand more for ourselves and others, abolition orientates us towards what Mariame Kaba describes as a horizon. We see the abolitionist horizon just beyond burning police cars, abandoned prisons and open borders. The time of abolition is both in the distance and already present. In the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “abolition is presence”: a form of faith that we can and will change everything. Abolition is the gift of the unfinished Black freedom struggle and its constant radicalisation, its ceaseless extension.

In Revolution is not a one-time event. activists, academics and artists reflected on abolitionist praxis and thought, exploring covergences with gender, poetry, technology, performance, speculation, aesthetics, film and culture.

Revolution is not a one-time event was a programme held throughout August 2020 organised by Che Gossett, Lola Olufemi and Sarah Shin in collaboration with Arika and hosted by Silver Press.

3 August: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House: Abolitionist Feminist Futures — Gail Lewis, Miss Major, Zoé Samudzi @babywasu and Hortense Spillers, chaired by Akwugo Emejulu⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣⁣ 10 August: Poetry is Not a Luxury: The Poetics of Abolition — Saidiya Hartman, @Canisia.Lubrin, Nat Raha @full_nommunism and Christina Sharpe, chaired by @nydiaswaby ⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣⁣ 17 August: System Errors: Abolitionist Technologies and Aesthetics — American Artist @ivorytower_headass, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley @ladydangfua and Sondra Perry, chaired by Legacy Russell @ellerustle⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣⁣ 24 August: Happy Birthday, Marsha! — @adriennemareebrown, @blackobsidian_soundsystem and @tourmaliiine, chaired by @lowlamichelle

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Rupert invites all to a presentation by curator Taraneh Fazeli, followed by conversation with artist Katherine MacBride and Q&A with the audience. The talk will take place on Zoom on 1 December 2020, 19 00 (EET) and is open by registration only.

The talk and discussion will focus on the peripatetic exhibition, Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying

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PRESENTS is an online screening of short video works that don’t require an abled or physically present body in order to be performative. Ten sick and disabled artists come together to expand the idea of ‘performance’, presenting work that is embodied, immediate, and present without forcing bodies to conform to ableist norms of art-making.

Some works offer ways for us to dance together and feel connected to sick and queer community from our rooms. Others challenge us to radically slow down and match the pace of their words or their movements through the world. Many do not have a visual or do not have an audio component, highlighting what is present and what is absent. Each work feels like a gift, giving new possibilities for accessible art-making and relating to each other.

In addition to their video work, each artist has created a “score” for you to perform yourself alongside their work in your own home. The scores are invitations, instructions, challenges, and meditations that aim for you to feel the presence of the artist in the room with you.

All of the works, when necessary, are captioned and audio described. All scores are screen reader friendly or also come in audio format. Please use the “Accessibility Options” button on the top right of this page to reach other accessible formatting options.

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The fourth and final virtual event in the Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home offers a timely look at race and culture in America. Triangle Breathing: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, moderated by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon In a special session occuring just one week after Election Day, Hortense Spillers, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon will think through the implications of the election results and reflect upon the racial awakening sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Topics will include the necessity for police reform, the Black Lives Matter movement, and how race relations in the U.S. have become a flash point for global attention. These leading literary minds will also discuss how “law and order” can be assured in a society of such surprising lawlessness. Hortense Spillers is considered a foundational figure in Black feminist scholarship and is the inspiration behind Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ poetic work “Spill.” This intriguing link between the scholars was the inspiration for bringing them together for this special intimate session, in which they will be joined by moderator and poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. Don’t miss this topical conversation as we close out our series of bringing renowned writers to the Cornell community to share their work from the intimacy of their homes to ours.

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Tiffany Lethabo King, Associate Professor of African-American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University, joins us for FUC 018. Tiffany's research is situated at intersections of slavery and indigenous genocide in the Americas. Her book project The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019) argues that scholarly traditions within Black Studies that examine Indigenous genocide alongside slavery in the Americas have forged ethical and generative engagements with Native Studies—and Native thought—that continue to reinvent the political imaginaries of abolition and decolonization. The book theorizes Black Studies—and Black thought—as an offshore formation, or shoal, that interrupts humanist traditions and impulses within the field of settler colonial studies. RSVP for this event here: https://actionnetwork.org/events/fuc-018-tiffany-lethabo-king/ To see all of our upcoming talks, please visit our website: fuc-series.org

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Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre

Annual General Exchange 2020 - Provisions

31st October - 8th November

To those far and further,

In summer, we wanted to send a broad message of reliability in a sea of uncertainty – to say: AGE, our Annual General Exchange, will take place (but perhaps not form) this year, just like always.

Over the past years of AGEs, a lovely cohort of engaged practitioners has grown, finding ways to gather around research, exchange support and share in one another’s practices. It would be a loss, and a harder winter not to touch in with each other before the nights draw in.

But then, every week there seemed to be shifts – in R numbers, in policy, in legality, which made us stumble. As a centre for the meeting of people, BOARC wouldn’t risk those people. And as a communal space, BOARC feels it shouldn’t decree the ways in which communities come into contact. Yet – we all have to navigate this pandemic together as organic mass, and alone as potential carriers.

In the past two months, we’ve experimented with different modes of being together: from hypervigillant, sanitised and masked with people who have greater immuno-necessity; to aware and accepting with standard-week stayers.

Through all of this, it has been very important to the team here to resist narratives of viral shame – who’s ‘had it / caught it / passed it’ is not of interest. Instead, the focus has been: how do we protect those who need protecting, and enable those who need enabling?

So – how to bear this in mind for this year’s Annual General Exchange?

As of last week there were new restrictions in the North West of England, which includes the Wirral where the observatory lays. Everyone should work from home, and there are fines for more than six people gathering. From today, the restrictions grow tighter and it is advised not to travel into or out of the area.

Nevertheless, we'll still hold space for AGE20 - with an online proposition.

This is not to supplant us being in one space: AGE20 will be a different kind of animal. We would all like to try to give each other provisions for the coming months: as such, it will be a quiet and dedicated hunkering down, concentrating together on what we need feedback on. As always, the programme will expand or contract with the offers of those who’d like to join.

We’re proposing a rhythm of intention, attention and rest, in three cycles:

Intention days:

Are brief preparations. Send an email, share what you’d like to focus on, collect resources and we'll quickly schedule the next day.

Attention days:

Are whole days. We'll be grouping around the proposed workshops, lectures, cooking and co-study moments. We'll be basking our practices in focus.

Rest days:

Are breaks. Rest, relax, repose away from the screen.

Here are the dates:

Saturday 31st Oct - Intention & welcome / Samhain ritual in the evening

Sunday 1st Nov - Attention

Monday 2nd Nov - Rest

Tuesday 3rd Nov - Intention

Wednesday 4th Nov - Attention

Thursday 5th Nov - Rest & Fireworks

Friday 6th Nov - Intention

Saturday 7th Nov - Attention & Annual General Meeting of the observatory

Sunday 8th Nov - Rest (Parting)

If you would like to join, please send an email to: enquiries@bidstonobservatory.org

We will give you login details to join us online, ask how we can participate together, and give more info on timings.

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We Keep Each Other Safe: Mutual Aid for Survival and Solidarity by Barnard Center for Research on Women

On Nov 12, Spade will be joined by anti-violence organizers Mariame Kaba and Ejeris Dixon to discuss mutual aid as an abolitionist project. Why is mutual aid key to practicing abolition? How does mutual aid relate to transformative justice and other anti-violence frameworks and practices? How can mutual aid help us to reimagine responding to harm and violence without relying on police? Thu, November 12, 20207:00 PM – 9:00 PM EST

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Spaces In/between: Critical approaches to care & collectivity online by TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

Exploring concepts of community and care in online spaces, this panel brings together artists, activists and researchers to discuss individualism, collectivity and care performed through digital technology. Speakers include writer Orit Gat, design activist Maral Pourkazemi and Dr. Francesca Sobande, lecturer in digital media studies.

Tue, 20 October 2020 13:30 – 15:00 EDT

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Jerome Jones is a current asylum seeker with over a decade of experience in activism, advocacy, and HIV prevention and treatment. Jerome is known to their peers as a walking community resource manual. They are an active member within LGBTQIA+ migrant communities in NYC and across the nation. Jerome regularly develops workshop curriculum to educate the public on migration, HIV, healthcare, housing rights, and much more. When not providing support to the community, you can find Jerome cooking, dancing, or cuddling.

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20–24 Nov 2019 Tramway, Glasgow

With: Jay Bernard | boychild | Mijke van der Drift | Denise Ferreira da Silva | James Goodwin | Stefano Harney | Laura Harris | Nathaniel Mackey | Alexander Moll | Fred Moten | Arjuna Neuman | Nat Raha | Nisha Ramayya | Wu Tsang | Ueinzz | Jackie Wang | Fernando Zalamea

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Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre

Annual General Exchange 2019

31st October - 5th November

Our Annual General Exchange (A.G.E.) is the space of joy we leave clear in the diary every year, a spooky parenthesis between Halloween and Bonfire Night, where the blue glow of protection spells mark out space for practice and exchange.

Rather than fixing every minute of the program beforehand, the AGE is more of an invitation - an invocation perhaps - calling towards collective resourcing or collective bracing for winter.

most mornings are preserved for moments of waking, stretching and sharing

some afternoons are filled with seminars, lectures and workshops

a couple of evenings are dedicated moments of fire and wine and dance

there’ll be one annual general meeting about the organisation of the research centre

  Offerings:

This year, the proposition is to start by thinking through the cosmogonies of Technic and Magic, and to end by celebrating the soil, thinking through matters of care in compost.

Technic & Magic

Federico Campagna’s latest book, Technic & Magic, invites us to think metaphysics as a literary genre, and to consider the origin narratives which set up different reality systems. Federico will present, over two days, Technic as current hegemonic ordering, which produces a ‘crisis of reality’. The version of reality that is proposed by Technic gives primacy to absolute language and the existence of things becomes solely dependent on linguistic categories. Technic then decrees that if you fall outside of linguistic categories (not female, not trans, not male, not European, no passport, no papers), you become extinct before you die.

Magic, on the other hand, is that which cannot be included in language, the ineffable. It is the shadow side of Technic, and takes a different form in each society. What is the existential and ontological impact of magic, that allows for vanishing, for occultism for initiation and secrecy: for creating space within & without one’s own historical time? Magic as a practice allows for individuals to reset reality for themselves, at the same time as engaging in wider emancipatory projects. We’ll be looking at magic as a form of therapy and a way of addressing structural inequality.

Matters of Care

Following Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Susan Leigh Star’s feminist technoscience practices, we’ll be thinking compost and decomposition through the body, working with the located, wormy layer of fibrous matter under our feet. Reading through Matters of Care, by Puig de la Bellacasa, and moving towards her current research, we’ll be considering soil as infrastructure, final resting place and living breathing entity. How can we think in terms of appropriate scales: how to make or craft the appropriate scale, rather than borrowing and performing never-ending techno-extententions, whilst working with the fertility and infertility of the land around? In Maria’s own words: ‘Standing by the vital necessity of care means standing for sustainable and flourishing relations, not merely survivalist or instrumental ones.’

oh seductive metaphor

network flung over reality

filaments spun from the body

connections of magic

extend

extend

extend

who will see the spaces between?

From The Net, S. Leigh Star, 1995

About AGE: The annual general exchange is the recurring event in the year, programmed by the observatory team. Most other workshops, groupings and gatherings are put together by stayers, whose meetings have different degrees of visibility depending on the research / needs of the group.

People coming to the AGE are welcome and invited to suggest and set moments for their own practice, to add to, hold-with or give steerage to the proposed thematic. There will be time for this during the loose schedule of the AGE. If you’d like to ask questions about this in advance, or would like assistance plotting, please send us a mail. Or, if you’d like to wait and see whether it feels right, that’s also good!

Input can take many welcomed forms: workshops, extended conversations, trying out new ideas or working through content. In general – we’re looking to create an atmosphere of attention and experiment, with thoughtful and feelingful critique, which might be slower and more informal than giving a lecture, and as joyous, intense or dreamy as you’d like.

Practicalities:

The maximum number of stayers is 26, and people booking for the whole duration get priority.

If you would like to participate for the duration, the suggested arrival is on the 31st in the morning, and the last event is on the 5th in the evening, however it is possible to stay longer.

The nightly fee is as usual, £15 per person, per night.

This event is communal cooking rather than self-catering. Food contribution is £10 per person per day. Please let us know preferences and any allergies when booking.

For people coming from Liverpool who’d like to engage with the program, but not stay over, there will be a public event on Saturday 2nd November. It is also possible to join for more of the program, just drop us a mail.

To reserve a place or for any questions: enquiries@bidstonobservatory.org

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Folds Reparative reading of the event Thursday 11.07.2019 20:00 - 23:00 uur

at West Den Haag ‘Folds: Reparative reading of the event’ is a performative event hosted by Pia Louwerens and co-hosted by Sven Dehens, with Émilie Noteris. It is the first in a series of ‘Folds’: experimental evenings in which we experience how we as participant, observer, artist and institution co-create (art) events. The ‘Folds’ are shaped using methods of narrative and performance, seeing double, permeability, collaboration, appropriation, superpositioning and, as the title suggests, folding. In ‘Folds: Reparative reading of the event’ the practice of Sven Dehens will be joint together with Louwerens’ artistic research into the Alphabetum and auditorium at West. The event proposes a programme around the notion of ‘reparative reading’. This notion stems from scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who proposed the concept in the 90’s as a critique of what she called ��paranoid reading’: the methodological centrality of suspicion and paranoia in critical practice. ‘Reparative reading’, on the other hand, is a mode of critique that works from assemblage, construction and queer joy. This event will be accompanied by Émilie Noteris. She will present her book ‘La Fiction Réparatrice’, providing us with strategies to reparatively read the event together. The auditorium will screen Data Feels (2019), a short video by Karisa Senavitis, on webs of care and ghostpipe (an unusual plant studied for medicinal properties). From the library to the bookshop, from the cinema to the auditorium, this ‘reparative reading of the event’ will fold points which are close but also far away together to create different, hybrid constellations. ‘Embedded artistic researcher’* Pia Louwerens uses her strange function description as a starting point for research. What does it mean for an artist and her practice to be embedded into an institution? To be embedded suggests a position of extreme proximity and intimacy. How to be a critical researcher from tshis insider position, rather than one of reflective distance towards an outside object? Attempting to see difference without distance, Louwerens is interested in the entanglement between the inside and the outside, pointing out the moments where they become weirdly indistinguishable.

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HOW MANY OF US WILL BE THRIVING FOR STONEWALL 100? 6-8pm, June 25th, 2019 On the Highline, 14th street, FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME. In 1994, with over 700 000 people living with HIV in the USA, and AIDS the leading cause of death for all Americans ages 25 to 44, ACT UP New York recognizes STONEWALL 25 by creating a handout that on one side reads, HOW MANY OF US WILL BE ALIVE FOR STONEWALL 35? Now, in 2019, with over 1 million people living with HIV in the USA, and AIDS still an epidemic for many people across the country, especially for people already dealing with bias systems, WHAT WOULD AN HIV DOULA? recognizes STONEWALL 50 by asking, HOW MANY OF US WILL BE THRIVING FOR STONEWALL 100? Join us on June 25th on The High Line for an interactive evening of readings, performances and activities as we tackle the question and plan for our queer well being. Featuring: Sheldon Raymore, from American Indian Community House Ngozi Alston, from Black Youth Project 100 Sonia Guiñansaca Timothy DuWhite and the skills of What Would An HIV Doula Do? members: Tamara Oyola Santiago, Jaime Shearn Coan, Nicholas D'Avella, Ollin Rodriguez Lopez and Mallika Singh !

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'Quotidian Pasts', the second chapter of the exhibition series 'Colored People Time', reconsiders the trafficking of blackness through colonial practices of collecting, commodifying, and exhibiting people and objects from the African continent. By pairing the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s archival materials with artist Matthew Angelo Harrison’s contemporary 3D-printed sculptures, this exhibition challenges us to question how we see and make meaning of “authentic” African sculpture and how we assign cultural and commercial capital and value on African objects. These complex conversations are sited locally, here, in West Philadelphia. 'Quotidian Pasts' is a reminder that history never occurs in the past tense, but is present with us in the here and now.⁣ ⁣ 'Colored People Time: Quotidian Pasts' is on view at the ICA in Philadelphia through August 11. The third chapter of the exhibition, 'Banal Presents', will be on view September 13-December 22. ⁣ ⁣ #QuotidianPasts

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Come stretch out, relax, share popcorn & stay over if you like - pick n' choose! We're hosting independent screenings of films lesser seen in Liverpool, and there's the sleepover option afterwards, in one of the bedrooms at the observatory. Screenings > £5 Sleepover & Screening > £15 Dinner > £4 per head Check our listings for times and films!

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AIDS VIDEO ACTIVISM: WOMEN AND INCARCERATION A VIDEO PROGRAM FOR "METANOIA"

Programmed by Katherine Cheairs & Alexandra Juhasz

Monday, April 8, 2019 6-8 p.m. at The Center