HYPATIA VOURLOUMIS

In ‘Soldier of Love’ Sade sings of how, in the hinterlands of devotion, she does her best to survive (in) the wild wild west. In Wu Tsang’s film Wildness Flawless Sabrina stands on the bar of the Silver Platter and celebrates the ways in which ‘the fist is still up’, echoing the collective choreographed stance and scene that closes Sade’s video. This day of the conference-festival seeks to incite a tumultuous chorus made up of the encountering of differing yet correlating aesthetic, theoretical and militant resonances swarming across manifold times and spaces. An improvised gathering of diasporic thinkers and practitioners, the day of study will seek to critically reverberate fugitive senses, feelings and transmissions of an uncommon and unknowable in advance, ‘brown commons,’ in the words of José Esteban Muñoz. These staged chance convergences and divergences (including their particular geopolitical, regional, physical, material and sensorial conditions of possibility) explore wayward and errant paths, as Saidiya Hartman writes, to study how, ‘in a minor key,’ ungovernable experiments in the social art of life discrepantly exceed colonial orderings and framings of life and art. Presentations and performances will delve into the aesthetic practices and unruly visons of queer diaspora, sensual excess and brown jouissance, the poetics of emergent aberrations, the magic of science and the intertwining of neurodiverse sensory circuits, futurisms and distorted constellations, the love song, anticolonial time, and the dancing of things and nothingness.