Fall 2020: Identities Annihilated

Movement I: September 14–October 25, 2020

Participants: Federica Bueti, Anastasia Diavasti, Moriah Evans, Daniel Hui, Sumugan Sivanesan, Kostas Tsioukas

Movement II: November 2–December 13, 2020

Participants: Noor Abed, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Natassa Dourida, Latent Community, Will Rawls, Myrto Tsilimpounidi

Chef-in-residence: Stavros Chrysafidis

Writer-in-residence (Movement I & II): Alkisti Efthymiou

The world’s borders, and their material and discursive geopolitically designed forces, both internal and external to nation-states, are violently determined by the essentialist maneuvers of identity politics. The term identity politics once meant "life sharing" as described by the US-based black, feminist and queer Combahee River Collective, who first coined the term in 1977 as a way to raise political consciousness and to realize liberation from within one’s own intersectional struggles as opposed to merely attending to the struggles of ‘others.’ Identity politics today means an exclusionary way of being, a policing of fixed identity, and the closing of ranks against difference instead of a liberatory political force that begins with one’s person, community and expands to include other cοmmunities and other lives.

We will practice a methodological structure of collective study and experimentation, aesthetically and poetically imagined through non-linear associative principles. Crucially, as we will find ourselves on the Mediterranean coast, and in a city that is the constructed ancient origin of Western civilization and white supremacy, we will think through the notion of historical identity as a performative, as method, and not a state of being. In other words, we will engage with questions of doing as opposed to knowing or being, attend to the ongoing legacies of colonial and anticolonial history rather than ontological claims, refuse linear time, embrace opacity and the movement of freedom, practice disidentification. We will ask: how are we all entangled, in the quantum physics’ sense, in a planetary 'difference without separability' as Denise Ferreira da Silva writes? How are we always already "singular-plural" (Jean-Luc Nancy), in the elsewhere and otherwise? How can we destroy the fixed notions and categories of separation inherent to racial capitalism through the aesthetics of a transformative mode of history and time, through the aesthetic imagination and its materializations as transformative and abolitionist force? How are we always already sharing out the unshareable, invaluable, incalculable?

*Image credit: 'Fulfillment of a Promise.' Hypatia Vourloumis (with stills from Wu Tsang's 'Into a Space of Love'). Erica Scourti (ed.), The Happy Hypocrite: Silver Bandage, Issue 11, Publisher: Book Works, London, 2019.