happenings in space #5: nov. 2 - nov. 8, 2020
pleasure activism in the arts, spatializations of time, the antarctic imaginary, mapping the new politics of care, Nara Park's faux architecture, a history of cities as a history of listening.
we’re setting our clocks back and thinking of Johanna Drucker’s talk on mapping local time, we’re listening to the crunching of leaves beneath our feet and to Shannon Mattern’s auditory history of the city, we’re accepting our limited capacities as we take the time to vote, breathe and act this week.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3 - VOTE!
MEG ONLI: COLORED PEOPLE TIME — COOPER UNION — 7:00 PM EST
Organized by Meg Onli and divided into three distinct chapters–Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, and Banal Presents–Colored People Time used the black vernacular phrase “Colored People’s Time” (CPT) to explore the ways that dominant notions of time have been used to control and condemn black people across times and spaces. CPT names a political performance by black people to evade, frustrate, and ridicule the enforcement of punctuality and productivity, key disciplinary structures of capitalism. In addition, CPT challenges and disavows the predominant opinion that being “on time” is the only way of being “in time.” Over the course of one year, the ICA staged three consecutive exhibitions, allowing the artists and Onli to build and respond to one another’s ideas over time. The project commenced with an installation by artist Martine Syms, grounded in her text The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, and approaching the subject of black futures as one inevitably tied to the past.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4
LESS SEPARATE, STILL UNEQUAL: CITIES, SUBURBS, AND THE UNFINISHED STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE — RICE — 6:00 CST
The crises of 2020 have turned an international spotlight on ongoing inequalities in metropolitan America. In this sweeping overview of race and inequality in American cities and suburbs, Thomas J. Sugrue turns attention to the spatial origins of racial inequality, bridging the urban past with our troubled present. He discusses what has changed for the better and what has remained unaddressed over the half century since the urban uprisings and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and how urban activists, policymakers, and planners can chart a direction forward.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5
SPACE WARS: AN INVESTIGATION INTO KUWAIT'S HINTERLAND — CORNELL — 12:00PM PST
Commissioned by the National Council for Culture, Art and Letters (NCCAL), the Kuwait Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia attempts to respond to the theme set forth, 'How will we live together?' through the discovery, interpretation, and projection of the hinterland. The curators–working across the boundaries of architecture, art, policy, and urbanism–were selected in response to NCCAL's interest in commissioning projects that engage with cultural expressions and archaeological histories embodied in the desert landscape. Space Wars seeks to address these questions through an in-depth inquiry and analysis of the hinterland, projecting spatial defenses, offenses or alliances that define the future of these landscapes under threat—threat from extinction, threat from overuse, threat from domination and, at times, the threat of being forgotten. Panelists: Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, and Yousef Awaad
PLEASURE ACTIVISM IN THE ARTS — Paul Robeson Galleries — 11:00AM PST
How to Survive the End of the World is a four-part program series exploring the ways in which artists and art workers express social, cultural and political philosophies through their art practice. Stitching together an assemblage of videos, images, music, and prose, in this lecture Pleasure Activism and the Arts, Ifeanyi Awachie and Nydia A. Swaby will share how ‘pleasure activism’ informs their curatorial practice. The lecture will review programs Awachie and Swaby co-curated to explore pleasure through the work of Black feminist artists and thinkers.
WHAT IF NATURE HAD A SEAT AT THE TABLE? — TUFTS — 9:00AM PST
The 2020s are a critical decade of urgent action to arrest the worst impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss and in which to build resilience to changes as we cross planetary boundaries and tipping points. COVID-19 has shown us what happens when we ignore scientific evidence of the risks of our encroaching on nature. 75 years after the founding of the UN the governance of our international systems is outmoded, with institutions, organizations and mechanisms dominated by a few powers, many of whom have demonstrated, at best, benign neglect in recent years. These mechanisms have struggled to value planetary health and our wellbeing and to integrate that in economic, social and political decision making. As the UN celebrates an important milestone, amid unprecedented challenges to multilateral cooperation, Rachel Kyte imagines how we may give nature a seat at the table and what would change if its voice, needs and contributions could be heard.
EDDIE OPARA IN CONVERSATION WITH ERIC CHANG — MIT — 4:00 PDT
This symposium will explore intersections of design and architecture with a focus on Media’s capacity to bring people together in public space and its role in society and in civic design. How do architecture and graphic design communicate to communities, alone and together? The conversation evolves out of a collaboration between Opara and Chang, a dynamic seven-story digital installation at MahaNakhon, Bangkok‘s tallest tower. While rooted in a specific collaboration, the conversation’s themes of diversity, identity, media, and public space are particularly relevant at a time in which all these issues, and their intersections, are being re-examined and re-thought.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6
ARTIST TALK WITH NARA PARK — HIRSHORN MUSEUM — 9:00AM PST
Washington, DC-based artist Nara Park uses faux building materials to create sculptures and installations that investigate the relationship between humans and the built environment, often referring to inhabited landscapes and the imprints left behind when they are abandoned. Impacted by the profound grief of losing her father, Park’s work explores the transient nature of life and how monuments act as surrogates for that which we have lost. At first glance, her sculptures appear to be made of materials such as marble that signify gravitas and longevity, but a closer look reveals that they are often constructed using disposable components such as thin plastic packaging and wallpaper.
THE ANTARCTIC IMAGINARY — CORNELL — 12:00PM PST
Nadim Samman: According to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the world's southern continent is reserved for peaceful scientific enterprise. Owned by no individual or nation (with sovereign claims suspended), its legal-institutional framework is the most successful example of international cooperation in the previous century. The exclusive right that this document accords research, incorporating a proscription against the exploitation of natural resources, and conflict, is justly celebrated. But is this the whole story? The Antarctic Pavilion and Antarctic Biennale projects (2015 to present) explored Antarctica’s repressed cultural dimension—asking what role the Antarctic Imaginary can play in the constitution of new political subjectivities. Can we be Antarctican? What role do art and architecture have?
CALVIN WARREN: BEING BLACK OUT/BLACKED OUT BEING: NIHILISTIC CONSIDERATIONS — WHAP! CAL ARTS — 4:30 - 6:00 PM PST
Calvin Warren is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Warren’s research interests are in Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and theology. Duke University Press published his first book, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018). He is currently working on a second project, Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality, which unravels the metaphysical foundations of black sexuality and argues for a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies.
ONGOING EXHIBITIONS, FILM SERIES, ETC.
MAPPING THE NEW POLITICS OF CARE — YALE, COLUMBIA
Launched by Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership, Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research, this map explores the vulnerabilities of our communities in the age of #COVID19 and how to respond to them. | COVID-19 affects our communities differently. Health and social vulnerabilities that predate the pandemic have fueled uneven effects across the United States. Unless we address the long-standing inequalities embedded in the social and political landscape of the country along with the immediate needs produced by the pandemic, we will come out of the current crisis just as vulnerable as when this all began.
BLACK BOTANY: THE NATURE OF BLACK EXPERIENCE — NYBG — EXHIBITION
Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience seeks to acknowledge the complex relationship between enslaved Black people, nature and the colonial environment and reconsider the conscious omission of Black knowledge of the natural world.
PERFORMANCES FOR HANDS AND DESERT FLOOR | JILL R. BAKER | ANTI-AESTHETIC — VIDEO SERIES
Performances for Hands and Desert Floor performs a physical and embodied relationship with the landscape. Each piece considers performance, sound, and mark-making in landscape and was created on site in the Mojave desert outside of Death Valley National Park in Rhyolite, Nevada at the Goldwell Open Air Museum and Residency Program. Jill R Baker is a visual artist whose work employs drawing, performance, and video to document improvised interactions with the natural world.
The R.A.W. POSTLIBRARY | Karin Bolender | ANTI-AESTHETIC — RESIDENCE
Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart) is an artist-researcher who seeks "untold" stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, pollinators, microbes, and many others. Under the auspices of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), she cultivates a homegrown, collaborative living-art-research practice that explores dirty words and entangled wisdoms of earthly ecologies through performance, writing, video/sound installation, and other experimental arts of multispecies storytelling. The R.A.W. PostLibrary is an ecological LivingArtResearch performance-residency, exploring the hyperlocal/hyperglobal ecologies of staying-at-home, whatever “home” might mean.
UNOCCUPIED TERRITORIES: THE OUTLYING ISLANDS OF AMERICA'S REALM — CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION — EXHIBITION
At the outer edges of the USA are the tattered fragments of its dominion, known as the Minor Outlying Islands. Though officially uninhabited, each of these islands is one of the 14 Territories of the USA (along with five that are inhabited: Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa). Over the course of empire, most of these remote atolls and islets have been utterly transformed, by resource extraction and global wars. Now they are remnants of our history, where human visitation is restricted or banned outright. The islands are being reclaimed by wildlife, and evolving in their own way. Their future is driven less by national interests, and more by the collective needs of the planet.
MAKING SENSE — Penn Program in Environmental Humanities — EXHIBITION
Making Sense is an art exhibition supplementing and illuminating the scholarly talks included in the Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling program. The digital gallery features digital objects contributed by artists and scholars who are also participating in the Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling Convening. Objects are good to think with and those displayed here provide imaginative prompts to conceptualizing environmental challenges that often elude representation.