Du 11 au 26 juillet 2015 rencontres et improvisations autour de The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study par F. Moten et S. Harney (Autonomedia, 2013).
International event building on a year-long engagement with Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. The event was in collaboration with our partner DS4si and with Black Lives Matter.
De nombreux partenaires et collaborateurs internationaux du projet Immediations se sont déplacés à cette occasion. Parmi eux, les intervenants sociaux Kenneth Bailey, Lori Lobenstine et Judith Leeman du Design Studio for Social Intervention ( HYPERLINK “http://ds4si.org/” http://ds4si.org/), basé à Boston, USA. Nous avons pu compter sur la présence (aussi bien virtuelle que physique) des auteurs de l’ouvrage autour duquel de multiples ateliers, discussions et propositions performatives ont conglomérées. Avec la participation d’artistes et chercheurs venus d’Australie, d’Israël, du Brésil, d’Allemagne, du Mexique et des Etats-Unis.
Pop-up Propositions | Série de propositions émergentes:
Exposing Relation: Twirl-Whirl Towards the Nar
Une proposition de pensée, par Mattie Sempert, autour des notions de sensibilité, d’exposition et de l’haptique.
Thinking the « prophetic organization » of the undercommons with The Invisible Committee’s To our Friends – Librairie-atelier « La passe ».
« Lorsqu’une idée émise en assemblée prenait, c’était simplement qu’assez de gens la trouvaient bonne pour se donner les moyens de la mettre en œuvre, et non en vertu de quelque principe de majorité. Les décisions prenaient, ou pas; jamais elles n’étaient prises. » (À nos amis, p. 60)
“We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. (…) We ask and we tell and we cast the spell that we are under, which tells us what to do and how we shall be moved, here, where we dance the war of apposition. We’re in a trance that’s under and around us.” (The Undercommons, p.19)
The contemporary geopolitical imaginary is in flame. The multiplication of protests and uprisings against austerity in recent years has made this fact ever more obvious: “crisis” doesn’t denote a critical moment of transformation anymore; it has become a technical term informing a new strategy of political management, a new form of governance. Facing the feeling of isolation and powerlessness generated by the neoliberal onslaught, rethinking the political means, for an increasing number of people, positing anew the problem of the commons and of collective organization.
It is in this context that we would like to bring together two recently published books that both present a radically anti-representational conception of politics. Each of them insist, in its own way, on a form of fugitive and sensible experience of a “wild common” that is about rhythms and resonances and escapes all forms of privative appropriation. Coming from the field of Black Studies, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons (Autonomedia, 2013) offers a passionate and poetical critique of neoliberal governance that meets in numerous ways À nos amis (La Fabrique, 2014), the last opus by the Invisible Committee. Refusing a conception of emancipation primarily mobilizing self-consciousness and auto-reflexivity, these two essays take ground in this “transe that’s under and around us” to develop a politics based on the arts of immanent attention and the powers of collective improvisation. They both rely on a strong conception of the “call” and attune to the idea that “to get organized doesn’t mean to subscribe to the same organization, but to act according to a common perception of the situation”.
In this presentation, we would like to think more in details how the poetic and political proposition of a « prophetic organization of the Undercommons » can be envisaged as a way to answer and pursue the idea, formulated both by Giorgio Agamben and the Invisible Committee, according to which only a form-of-life can constitutes itself as a destituent power.
This encounter needs music – Collective Listening Session (July 24th – 6pm)
A collective music sharing-listening, where thoughts take the form of a continuous proposition of songs.
“When we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order – the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose – we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.”
Tapilapi invites SenseLab to play: a day for scene making and environmental collective assemblages
Please join us for a kind of collage party in the making, TOMORROW, TUESDAY July 28th at 12:00 or at 2:00pm or both times if it suits you well. At the BLACK BOX in the EV Building at Concordia University. EV OS3-845-855. Just take the elevator near the Maisonneuve and Mackay entrance, all the way down and it is there, you can’t miss it.
Here are tentative working times so you can find your way in either for Session 1 or for the second:
12:00pm (Session 1) Launch meeting
We will attempt to introduce you to our environment-making techniques and share with you some enabling constraints. Hopefully we will start playing and doing and assembling in a blink. We will then work with the make-your-own-scene proposition.
1-2pm Go for lunch
A fundamental part of working is eating and having lunch with the people we work or around the people we work. For that reason we will give 40 min. or an hour or so to go for lunch as a technique, also as a way to expand and mobilize the working affective cartographies of the work.
2:00pm (Session 2) Assembling – Stitching – Performing/Non-performing
Basically a kind of putting together of the stuff in ways that can still leave room for the unexpected (don’t worry, it usually doesn’t work). We will play with ways of playing with stuff and ways of building a score in the making, we will rehearse and by the time the stuff is ready to perform itself and for itself we will still keep rehearsing as a porous proposal for the unfinished yet totally catalyzed and in its own concrescent state.
I WANT TO SING TO YOU
Chants a capella par Althea Baird, Metro Square Victoria, Lundi 27 Juillet, 13h
Duck Feet: A Nonsensical Soirée. Thursday, July 23rd 17h-19h @ FOFA
What: DUCK FEET is an atmosphere improvised collectively. Join us for wine and fizzy waters.
Where/When: in the FOFA courtyard from 5pm-7pm on Thurday, July 23rd.
Bring: a nonsensical outfit or aspect to your outfit.
A nonsensical script was written (Duck Feet) and was made to be broken, and was imagined to be a night mainly for fun (for vacation time) at the FOFA courtyard where everyone can take in a drink and a show (a semblance of an expression that tries to deny its multiplicity). Duck Feet is a modular atmosphere for feeling the informal in its apposition to the fabulatory instruments of sex, love, politics, and race. The power of a script barreling its way through, the power of the musicians trying to hack it down, the power of the soirée and its natural sociality, the power of the attendees and the phrases they speak (with style) or do not speak (with style). The attendees are invited to modulate DUCK FEET joyously in accord with whatever decides to happen. Everyone gets partial phrases that together make up aphorisms written in response to the Undercommons. But they never play in the “right” order. You speak them or change them.
Friday, July 17 – 11am – Speaker Series with Flo
Please come at the SenseLab (F.B. 630-19) this coming Friday, July 17, at 11am to know more about the work of Flo, Australian artist, thinker, activist and resident at the SenseLab.
Her presentation, “Direct Action” evades predetermination at every step” wants to explore “a somewhat associative ride through political direct action’s fundamental indeterminacy, the affect of protest and the way these phenomena are sometimes made felt through contemporary artworks/practices”
In lieu of an introduction
Where: Parc st viateur (Bernard and de l’epee)
When: July 20 2pm
Bring: The Undercommons
Escape, Refugees and Fugitive Planning
The situation in Europe at the Mediterranean sea concerns us a lot right now. Yet, this situation is very much linked to a global situation where migration is happening all over the world. At the same time we also have a violent climate and right wing debates against refugees going on in Germany and other countries right now. We would propose to share experiences in different contexts and location (Europe, Australia, Asia, US, Canada…). For who is interested we post two texts on the hub: “The Autonomy of Migration” from Papadopoulos/Stephenson/Tsianos. And a text we were discussing at the EU-Hub a couple of weeks ago: Heller/Pezzani “Liquid Traces”. Both texts shall only serve as background. The focus is on sharing and discussing our experience. How can the pressing current situations be connected to concepts of routes of escape, lines of flights or fugitive planning? And what kind of activism can result from this? How do these questions and concepts can be taken up by our experimentation with movement profiles for the 2016 EU event?
Disco Soup and Film Screening (of it) – Wednesday July 22 @ Park Jarry
Where: Mainly at Jarry park – Jean-Talon market preferably mandatory on your way to Jarry park
When: Wednesday July 22 – first meeting point at 5:30pm at place Shamrock near the bikes
second meeting point – Jarry Park from around 6-7pm
Fugitive planning: gaspacho, pop-corn, fruit, your best collective improvised salad, Mobile Bike Powered Cinema, live jam-music or my/your playlist, a lot to share around the time of a gold summer soup, and more to come
An experimental special evening inspired by the disco soup events: A Disco Soup with the live documentation and screening of it.
The Disco Soup was born to fight the waste of food. You can learn more about this initiative here: HYPERLINK “http://discosoupe.org” http://discosoupe.org
The principle is simple: gather food which is going to be throw away but still good from the market (Jarry park is at 7-10 min away from Jean-Talon market), cook while the music is playing and eat together.
During the Disco Soup, we encourage you to take small footages with your IPhone or IPad to gather some memories of it. After a small editing on site, and at the darkness of evening a screening of all the videos will be made.
Around 9pm – screening of “Les glaneurs et la glaneuse” de Agnès Varda
Locating and dislocating in a social emergency (Friday 24 July, 11am)
Thinking about social emergency procedures.
Thinking about the urgency of the frontlines and the importance of alternate perspectives. Thinking about tools to navigate the rip in social distance.
Thinking about pedagogy, habit, and whiteness.
Join us for a scattered offering of ideas.
Cuts and code – film screening and conversation on imposturing through cultural budget cuts
There is a new wave of significant cuts to cultural budgets in federal and provincial governments sweeping the Western world. Whether it’s here in Quebec with the recent CALQ $2.4million budget reduction; across the globe but home to many of us, in Australia with the transfer of $140million to the autocratic Fund for Excellence in the Arts; or elsewhere such as in the Netherlands. This Thursday evening, there’ll be a screening of the film “Cuts Make the Country Better” by friends of the SenseLab, François Lemieux et Edith Brunette.
The Art of Imposturing was the Movements of Thought series earlier this year here in Montreal. In order to consider alternate, or even invisible, activist methods, we explored: movements such as subversive affirmation (Eg. The Yes Men); concepts and methodologies such as speculative pragmatism, immanent critique (Manning and Massumi), depersonalising trust (Massumi), transindividualism and irony; as well as tactics including embodying certain codes to infiltrate political circles. “Cuts Make the Country Better” explores how “in 2011, a right-wing coalition government announced drastic cuts in public funding for the arts in the Netherlands. Artists and cultural workers share their views on the effects of the cutbacks as well as on the strategies, both political and artistic, that took shape thereafter. The projection will be followed by a discussion.”
The screening will be held around the Centre-Sud / Hochelaga area and then we’ll move to a cliché dark, salon-esque bar for our discussion. People joining via phone or skype are most welcome!
CUTS AND CODE
Thursday 16 July, 8pm
L’Écarté Café 2525, rue De Rouen, Montreal (screening and discussion on the film) Later, Le Cheval Blanc, 809 rue Ontario east, Montreal (conversation on imposturing tactics)
HYPERLINK “https://thesenselab.basecamphq.com/projects/12943158-undercommons/posts/93937032/comments” Inherited Instruments
What: An encounter on radio and on the street. From one side, a felted text, passages of others writings stripped of their citational armor; from another side, a classical guitar given to a son by a father after the father loses his ability to play because of a stroke. Playing and reading simultaneously, Inherited Instruments is both drawing out and thwarting the other’s best loved way of sounding themselves.
When and Where: Tonight (Sunday, July 26th) from 9pm to 10pm, turn an analog knob to 104.4FM (in a two square block radius of FOFA) or see the broadcast from the street (the north side of Ste. Catherine between Mackay and Guy).
*This propulsion is happening within Laura Acosta’s Poe Radio piece currently on exhibition as part of Visitations. Visitations is a collaborative exhibition with Matthew-Robin Nye, Jacinthe Loranger, and Laura Acosta running until August 20th at the FOFA Gallery in downtown Montréal
Fugitive Mapping (with Mike Hornblow, Bianca Scliar, Matthew Robin-Nye)
Wednesday July 22, 2pm (right after ‘In Lieu of an Introduction’)
30mins, or other appetite…
FOFA Gallery, ground floor, EV Building Concordia
We invite you to pop in to FOFA Gallery for some FUGITIVE MAPPING as part of the VISITATIONS exhibition. We’ll be co-composing and reworlding found materials, household products, and so on… to re-imagine the Grid as enabling constraint for making a break.
In an emergency we use whatever we can get our hands on, and go with our hunch even if we can’t put our finger on it. There are so many things we carry and have around that pass through us and issue from us to distribute collective agency in the world. They make things livable, but they’re also killing us… not just as some environmental damage scenario, but in the glimmer of relations not yet given or even allowed. How may we evoke a relational alterNet of social dis/organisation, a kind of monstrous jouissance?
Please bring any Things that resonate with the above, or offer a question… or just come! In the spirit of fugitive pop-ups this action will be of indeterminate length, open to alterity.
*Footnote – the process will leave its traces (conceptual and material) for the VISITATIONS event on Thursday July 23; with KETL (4:30pm) / DUCK FEET (5-7pm