Join us on Wednesday 18 September for a lecture on Xenofeminism and Planetary Orientation with artist, writer and designer Patricia Reed.
Lecture
Xenofeminism and Planetary Orientation
Wednesday 18 September 2019, 16.00 – 18.00
Master Institute of Visual Cultures, Parallelweg 21-23, ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Entrance is free.
Drinks afterwards
In this lecture, the Xenofeminist Manifesto will be introduced through the prism of four primary claims: gender abolitionism, feminism and reason, denaturalization, as well as the repurposing of technology for emancipatory ends.
Following the introduction, the lecture will focus on navigation at the scale of the planetary, discussing a politics of care, not just as an ethics, but as spatial, representational and epistemological problems to be worked on. It will be argued that this dimension of coexistence demands new frames of reference for making it amenable to thought and experience in order to transition from simply recognizing this scale, to knowing how to co-exist within it meaningfully. Because our capacity to navigate this scale is contingent on making it intelligible to human cognition, aesthetic practices play an important role in constructing experimental perspectives through which to sense new positions, and hyper-relations of being at this dimension.
Biography Patricia Reed
Patricia Reed is an artist, writer and designer based in Berlin. Through various mediums, her work concerns the movement from what is in the world, towards what could or ought to be. As a broad interest, the entanglement between concepts and materials is a particular point of focus. More concretely, how ideas of the world, including ideas of what it is to be human, manifest as structures of cohabitation. The premise being, that since concepts and assumptions are baked into social organizational forms (our technologies, modes of valuation/distribution, inter-human relations, human and earth-system relations), it is necessary to interrogate what those grounding concepts are, in order to imagine transformative possibility otherwise. What other forms of material co-existence could be enabled when departing from different conceptual grounds, and how does the dimension of the planetary provide a framework for denaturalizing long-standing assumptions of how we think the world and our place in it?
Patricia Reed is part of the Laboria Cuboniks (techno-material feminist) working group whose Xenofeminist Manifesto (2015) was republished by Verso Books in 2018. Her writings have been published in countless books and journals around the world. Recent publications include e-flux Journal
, Making & Breaking, Angelaki, the Glass Bead Journal, Xeno-Architecture (Sternberg Press), and Cold War Cold World (Urbanomic).
Lecture series
The Performative Defiance Lecture Series is an initiative of the Autonomy Research Chair at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt), organized in collaboration with and hosted by the Master Institute of Visual Cultures. Its aim is to provide within Avans University an open, public forum where some of the foremost national and international voices challenge us to think about and discuss the role of art and design for the creation of a different future, to imagine another kind of world, the kind of world we wish to live in.
The notion performative defiance refers to creative practices that depart from the idea of the future as a mere update of the present and calls for a recharge of aesthetic practice that turns complicity into defiance. What is required of art and design is an aesthetic mobilization to unsettle and then create the conditions that will ensure our survival and enhance our capacity to create and resist in the future. Performative defiance is therefore an articulation of a creative longing for a desirable future that lends itself to a counter position
set against the deadlock of the present and against the symbolic misery of our time.
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Watch previous lectures online
The lecture by Patricia Reed is the thirth public lecture in the Performative Defiance Lecture Series. The previous lectures can be viewd on the Youtube Channel of the Master Institute of Visual Cultures.
#1 Brian Holmes, After Chimerica: Art and Bioregionalism in the Anthropocene
#2 Justin O’Connor, Creative Industries in China: From Catch-Up to Cold War 2.0
