STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES

How much and what sort of ‘agency’ do we need to move with others
without falling into a politics of the same, a politics that values or assumes sameness or homogeneity [...]
attempting to stand in the cracks and intersections of multiple histories of domination and resistances to domination?

Maria A. Lugones [1]
 

STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES investigates the contours of the history of the United States and the hegemonic narratives that form and uphold it. This research project maps the ruptures caused by these narratives to invoke stories that were lost between, took form within, or stood above its cracks. With the arts as our plurivocal medium, we trace genealogies and counter-narratives of diasporic and indigenous communities within, and beyond, the imperial reach of the United States.

We call on extra-disciplinary artistic contributors to lead us from a genealogical understanding of their own lived experience and to reflect with us upon the manifold worlds within our own, composed of intergenerational memory. We take Maria Lugones’ work on building coalitions against multiple oppressions as a point of departure by posing a query on the types of agency needed for resilient empowerment against worldwide systems of domination, which have come from American colonialism and imperialism.

This multi-limbed project features pairs of micro-residencies as well as interventions in collaboration with our radio platform SAVVYZΛΛR, dedicated to the sonic as a space of healing, catharsis, and rebellion. As a means of resisting the homogenizing tendencies of the western art-historical canon, where subjectivities of struggle and epistemological diversities are marginalized, we invite practitioners whose works are hybrid and heterogeneous. Across the ongoing philosophies of decanonization and unlearning at SAVVY Contemporary, we extend our premises in this sonic and corporeal series to seek alliance against such structures of omission. For the on-site micro residencies of two weeks, trans-disciplinary American artists and contributors are invited to further develop their work and practices through researching and exchanging in Berlin with SAVVY Contemporary as their host. The sonorous contributions encourage communications across the arts as their own knowledge systems which can bring attention to diverse histories, connections, and cross-generations of sovereign, joyous, and dialogical futures.

We recognize cracks as crossings and openings. We see them as pathways that can allow us to build bridges across our differences and towards joined strategies of liberation, while simultaneously, refusing the universalizing trap of a “sameness” that Lugones warns against. These cracks allow us the possibility to enable agency across diverse forms of dissent and against forces of subjugation. Ours is an effort to unfurl the archives which took form within multidimensional, and even paradoxical, complexities of terrain and body – to trail how these entanglements have created roots of underground networks, climbing in non-linear turns and twists, while strengthening each other from below.

In this programme, we look toward the roots of communities and cosmologies that have been, or continue to be, under the influence or threat of the United States and turn to artists, activists, scholars, and each other, as narrators of our own stories, rather than observers of histories told and mistold by hegemonic throes. We call upon the continued birthing of worlds within worlds and the rising of transfigured forms amidst splits: where (dis)identifications [2] morph self, community, and place as a result of resilience or sheer need, due to being sites of violence in land or body through colonial time.

Let us understand diaspora as displacement, and societal fractures as teachers, where refusal of the imposed “given”, as in the feminist practices of Saidiya Hartman and Adriana Cavarero, can be forms of world building. It is by honoring liberation movements and traditions, deeply rooted in present community engagements and struggles, so that we can continue to be carried by them.