I have just completed my first major paper for my graduate study work on the Low Residency MFA Program at School of the Art Institute of Chicago! This was a much longer and richer process than I expected. The topic at which I arrived is very connected with a strand of my work that involves participatory performance. The paper is entitled: "Displacement as a Parafictive Strategy Toward a Sense of Being-in-Common in Art." I use this lens to look at works by Julieta Aranda, Janet Cardiff + Robert Bures Miller, and Sophie Calle. All of these works have the effect of creating a sense of being-in-common which I find very compelling. When I started this paper in late October, I could not have imagined how very poignant and urgent the topic would become in this post-2016 presidential election era in the United States.
* "We are in a condition of 'quantum entanglement.' We are connected to one another...the condition within which we live is one of difference without separability. Our social life is best described as a kind of mass, massive contact improvisation; and the brutality of life emerges out of our refusal or our disavowal of that fact."
- Fred Moten (using Denise Ferreira da Silva's phrase 'quantum entanglement')
Excellent talk by Fred Moten on Blackness and Performance given at Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Poland...a great man and an exquisite thinker.
LINK to the paper