News
Lila Abu-Lughod will deliver the lecture "Security and the Political Geographies of Gender Violence" as a part of the Liberal Studies Department Global Lecture Series.
Tuesday, December 3, 5:30 p.m.
NYU Liberal Studies
Hemmerdinger Hall, Silver Center
31 Washington Place
In the course of the first two After Progress symposia it has become apparent that, rather than an idea to be criticised, “progress” names instead an entire array of capitalist, colonial and extractivist operations. It is a world-ploughing machine that suffuses the very modern mode of evaluation from which the values of global development, infinite growth, technological innovation, and salvage accumulation are derived. And it is one which simultaneously infuses and animates well-meaning dreams of cosmopolitan redemption, and stories of innocence and reconciliation. Yet, despite its poisonous, ecocidal effects, we have also learned that its ruins are nevertheless teeming with divergent collective experiments whose practices upend the modern dream of progress, cultivating plural and divergent value-ecologies of living with others on Earth. Immanently, such experiments make present that other ways of making life worth living, and of making death worth living for, are not only possible but underway. Thus, in this third session of the series we seek to collectively hold out a trusting hand to a whole series of interstices and undercurrents, to a plurality of minor stories, earthly experiments, speculative propositions, and insistent possibilities, that intensify the political potentials of cultivating pluralistic value-ecologies otherwise – in the ruins of progress.
Speakers include:
Dimitris Papadopoulos (Nottingham)
Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Columbia)
Isabelle Stengers (Brussels)
Bronislaw Szerszynski (Lancaster)
Cosmopolis #2: rethinking the human
October 23–December 23, 2019
Centre Pompidou
Place Georges-Pompidou
75004 Paris
France
www.cosmopolis.centrepompidou.fr
The platform
Cosmopolis focuses on research-based and collaborative art practices, constructing bridges between new forms of creative experimentation and critical vocabularies from contemporary theory, between reconceived geographies and histories. Through residencies, exhibitions, discursive programs and publications, it engages with artists whose work is concerned with the production of relationships and the exchange of knowledge. Cosmopolis #1: Collective Intelligence (2017, Paris) focused on new forms of artistic collaboration, while Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence (2018, Chengdu) saw artists envisioning how to draw on artificial and ecological intelligence towards collectively defined ends.
Cosmopolis #2
Today there is widespread discussion of the post-human, yet many artists and such path-breaking interdisciplinary thinkers as Sylvia Wynter and Silvia Federici remind us that most humans have been excluded from “universal” formulations of the human and the idea of humanity. The European Renaissance fashioned “man” to the exclusion of women and non-Christians, the latter increasingly defined through the invented paradigm of “lesser races.” By the time of the industrial revolution in the 18th century, these philosophical formulations of humanity went hand in hand with a “civilizing” ideology that advocated for scientific rationality and technology’s ability to improve living conditions. European “Enlightenment” conceptions of the human were promoted within régimes of expropriation of resources, labour and reproductive capability. The technological, industrial and ecological transformations linked to the development of global capital in the modern era are inseparable from the racist and misogynist degradation of the horizon of humanity. This particular project of modernization, widely presented with the force of teleological inevitability, is today brought into question as one history, among many other possible paths not taken, of the evolution of technology and society.
Cosmopolis #2 explores how other cosmologies, economic systems and geographic articulations contain the bases of alternative social and technical configurations. It brings to the fore the possibilities of technological diversity, as well as the question of appropriate scale through artistic inquiries into how small-scale and differently configured social formations can generate other models and value systems—networking smaller units, de-industrializing and cultivating a fine attention to process and social rhythm. In his project Seeds Shall Set Us Free II, artist Munem Wasif works with the grain bank UBINIG, founded in 1984 by a group of activists in Bangladesh to support rice biodiversity and local agricultural knowledge, in a context where these were curtailed by Indigo and Jute cultivation imposed for the world market by the British colonial system. Sichuan-based artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun interweave in their Water System project questions of landscape, livelihood, climate change and the creation of alternative futures through small-scale actions with their collaborators, who include a farmer self-managing a reforestation project and a Qiang community creating a school of cultural traditions and sustainable living. French artist Tabita Rezaire conducts research into celestial technologies—notably the stone circles of Senegambia that date back to between the 7th and 15th centuries—drawing on astronomy, divination techniques, archeology and oral history to consider the implications today of effaced cosmological frameworks.
The project connects questions of scale and technological divergence to artistic explorations of the entanglement of the human and the non-human and of alternatives to neoliberal individualism, as seen notably in the critical propositions of key contemporary artist theorists Denise Ferreira da Silva and Elizabeth Povinelli, who bring into resonance ideas stemming from quantum thinking and diverse cosmological systems. In the context of Cosmopolis #2, Povinelli, a member of the Karrabing Film Collective, presents their recent cinematographic exploration of toxicity and indigenous agency, The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland. Da Silva’s Sensing Salon collaboration with Valentina Desideri undertakes a reading of Cosmopolis #2 using tools such as tarot, astrology, political therapy and reiki in order to generate alternative vocabularies and frameworks for interpretation.
Audra Simpson will deliver the General Anthropology Division Distinguished Lecture, “Empire of Feelings" for the American Anthropological Society meetings in Vancouver, British Columbia on November 22, 2019.
David Scott will present his lecture, "A Sense of Displacement: Stuart Hall's Art of Living" at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon.
Friday, 15 November 2019 @ 11:00am
Discussion series titled “Exploring the Seventh Continent”, to be held on the opening and closing weeks of the Biennial on 14 September and 9 November 2019, aims to initiate dialogue between the anthropological approach and artistic point of view by bringing together philosophers and biennial artists. Among the distinguished participants of the discussion series are; Assoc. Prof. Dr Ayfer Bartu Candan, known for her work on urban anthropology; Assoc. Prof. Dr Emanuele Coccia with his research on eco-politics, introducing the vegetal sphere into philosophy; Assoc. Prof. Dr Jennifer Deger who works on the axis of anthropology, art, digital culture and experimental ethnography; the anthropologist-author Jeremy Narby specialising on relation between shamanism and molecular biology; Prof. Dr Elizabeth Povinelli with her critical approach to late liberalism; Assoc. Prof. Dr Tobias Rees, known for his engagement with various organisms such as the brain, microbes, snails and artificial intelligence, pleading for a "post-ethnic" approach of anthropology; and Prof. Dr Laurent de Sutter who criticises the normative mind through his publications.
We are constantly hearing that humans face an epochal moment – that, if we’re not at the end, we’re inching close. And it’s not just one sort of ending. For many people, human beings and their earth seem to be close tomany modes of ending. We are hearing conversations about the end of the EU, the end of migrants’ rights and of liberal democracy, the end of gender, sexual, and racial justice; the end of humanity; the end of the planet. So what’s next?
Anthropologist and film director, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, one of the foremost thinkers in contemporary anthropology and gender studies, in a conversation moderated by Guilherme Blanc – director for Contemporary Art and Cinema of Ágora, E.M. and one of the curators for this year’s edition of Fórum do Futuro – will discuss how all the dreams that the West has invented for itself seem to have reached a catastrophic epilogue. What politics and affections would emerge, if, instead of a western analysis of finitude (a philosophy of the end), we developed a social theory with those who have been living after the end? In this lecture, Povinelli will situate one of these social theories in the Australian indigenous worlds, using the film The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland by the Karrabing Film Collective, an indigenous film and video collective based in Australia’s Northern Territory, which she co-founded and which uses film and installation as a form of popular resistance and self-organisation.
Audra Simpson will deliver the lecture “Savage States, Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow” to the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration at Yale University on October 10, 2019.
1968–2018: Historia colectiva de medio siglo—edited by Claudio Lomnitz and published by the National University of Mexico City—has received the Antonio García Cubas Award, given by the Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia (INAH). The publication commemorates fifty years of the 1968 movement, and won the award in the category of best publication for a general audience.
Claudio Lomnitz named "Distinguished Alumnus" (Egresado Distinguido) of his alma mater, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City.
La Gran Familia, a play written by Claudio Lomnitz and coauthored by Alberto Lomnitz, was nominated for the Premios Metropolitanos Awards in the categories of Best Original Music and Lyrics in a Musical, Best Leading Actress in a Musical, and Best Supporting Actress in a Musical.
Professor Lila Abu-Lughod is set to deliver the lecture, "Gender, Violence, Security" on Friday, November 1st as part of the B. N. Ganguli Memorial Lecture series at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.
Elizabeth Svoboda talks with Professor Catherine Fennell about mixed-income housing, the (lack of) development of "The Plan" to desegregate Chicago's neighborhoods, and what communities owe to their constituents.
Dr. Talal Asad, author of the iconic Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, will teach an "Exploring the Idea of Secular Reason" course in the fall.