Reading
RECONFIGURATIONS: Readings & Conversation on Radical Learning with Ugly Duckling Presse Pamphlet Authors
“My practice is liminal and boundless in that I’d prefer not to be categorised with ease because when my curiosity carries me elsewhere, I am not interested in explaining the logic behind what seems like a ‘transition’. I am not transitioning – I was never stationary. My artistic practice is nomadic insofar as I am wedded to certain rituals and time investments, but when and where I perform them is not dependent on a medium. I don’t want what I do to be exhaustible.” -Kameelah Janan Rasheed
“I’m in the world
I’m in the world
I’m in the world
I’m in the world
I must be part of it” -Diana Ross
Let’s take a second to be real. Being in the world is hard. The idea of maintaining a “practice” while navigating our daily informational/sensory/late-capitalism overload is hard. We are fed everything at once and then told to make sense of it: our wants, our bodies, the environment, debt, you name it. To be an artist in this moment (in some ways) is to battle your own attention span in a world designed to overstimulate us: quite simply, a _____ mess. So, that’s what we’re going to make, too. In this space, we will attempt to fully (re)consider process: from the gestures we lean on in our making, to our usual stimuli / points of departure, to our chosen containers—through the exploration of somatic techniques, writing prompts, & more. We will engage with artists / makers such as Doug Kearney, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Tierra Whack, Marjani Forte, and Lorna Simpson as we attempt to render utopia as an ontology, instead of an arrival.
