Is it clever, and if so, how to enter the museum from a diasporic position? What does it mean to claim that position, but to reject identity labels? What is a ‘subculture’ (before it is curated)? Panel with Nana Adusei-Poku, Pauline Boudry und Laima Kreivyté, Berlin, 26.10.2015
Continue reading
Nic Kay
performance and talk. Sat 24 Oct, 2015, Berlin-Kreuzberg
lil BLK is an experimental solo performance. Influenced by New York City gay/queer ballroom culture, live punk shows, butoh, and praise dance. lil BLK is a story about a fairy boi, child of god, little black girl, performer, and activist. Through the exploration of theatrical form, Nic Kay plays through a series of biographical moments that wrestle with the desires and the traps of being a black performer searching for freedom on the stage and in a beat.
Workshop
24 October, 2015
Based on short, inspiring, provocative quotes on queer aesthetics by thinkers of diverse backgrounds as well as a variety of (audio-) visual material, this workshop initiates a polylogue between artistic and theoretical approaches. Participants are invited to engage with each other and the material. Taking seriously the agency of art and theory, we develop and discuss understandings of queer audio-visual culture and its potential to intervene in a complexity of racist, sexist, heteronormative, ableist, and occidentalist structures. What does it mean, to rewrite violent histories and to invent futures from multiple and diverse queer perspectives – and with a little help from queer art and cultural politics?
Countering violence through visual activism.
public presentations, Raumerweiterungshalle, Berlin-Friedrichshain, 17. July 2015
In countering sexualized, gendered, and racialized violence. through audio, visual, and performative activism. Where do political strategies and artistic strategies meet – or collide? How do queer cultural interventions become empowering? How do geopolitical conditions, historical legacies, and personal experiences influence forms of queer cultural activism? How do resistant aesthetics and aesthetic/artistic resistance interact?
Teresa de Lauretis
lecture, Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin, 2. July 2015
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 8
Laplanche proposes that the sexual drive is not innate or endogenous but is constituted as an effect of seduction, repression, and translation. In the context of Laplanche’s theory of the sexual, the lecture examines the difference between drive and desire, the function of the concepts of castration and the Oedipus complex, the relations of sexuality and gender, and the nature of sublimation.
Leo Bersani
lecture, Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin, 18. June 2015
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 7
Foucault’s problematizing of the nature and even the existence of sexuality and sex is itself problematic. It should perhaps be seen as an important if somewhat late moment in the modern project of re-defining , or at the very least rearranging the terms of human intimacies.
workshop and readings
Café Rosi ich bin im Park, Berlin, 6. June 2015
When speaking of racialized intimacies, we do not only mean erotic and sexual relationships but also friendships as well as political contexts, which are fuelled or underlain by intimacies. While facing the fact that these relationships of choice do not exist beyond colonial histories or a neo-colonial and racist presence, we would still like to ask: Is queering possible? Can it be productive to take such forms of intimacy into account, as well as the promises, desires, fears, and anxieties that are entangled in the intertwining of racialization and eroticization? Short texts by Audre Lorde will serve as points of departure for our reflection process.
workshop series
various locations in Berlin
The series of workshops and public events seeks to challenge the colonial matrix of power and its legacies in different manifestations of intimacy in our everyday interactions. How do colonial, imperial, and racialized histories enter into, shape, and influence various forms of intimate relationships (queer, sexual, political, platonic, domestic)? And how can we contest and rework these histories through practices of un_learning? What does “un_learning” mean? What does the queer gap do to Spivak’s call to “unlearn one’s privileges”? How can we find new ways of facing the tensions and fractions within queer, feminist, queer of colour, anti-racist movements?
series of workshops
2014-2016 in south africa and germany
a series of three workshops that focus on questions of visuality, visual culture, and art in order to widen perspectives on sexualized and gendered violence. The project asks both about the potential violence of images and the semiotics, aesthetics, and effects of images of violence. It aims at exploring what the term visual activism means in different contexts and at different times.
Jelisaveta Blagojević
Tue 28 April 2015, ICI Berlin
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 5
In this talk, Blagojević used the notions of love and jealousy to point out how the Western, self-possessive, self-reflexive, and self-affective subject has constructed itself. The talk also dealt with Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of singular being to propose a sexually differentiated yet non-oppositional concept of “woman” – which might still serve as another name for the multiplicity of sexes that corresponds to the multiplicity of desires.
Continue reading