INCANTATIONS.
On Ecologies, Fugitivity, and Transmission

when the memories started to come, we were untrained, we didn’t even know how to tell each other what was happening. Eventually we would learn to share what went on while we were sleeping with all the specificity we had reserved for waking life. but at that time, when the memories came back, we were only starting to know.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive. After the End of the World

Within the framework of our project ECOLOGIES OF DARKNESS, you are cordially invited to a series of conversations, performances, presentations that investigate the politics of transmission, listening and visibility; reflecting upon the possibilities of forming networks of international solidarity, by sharing knowledges, histories and practices of resistance. Over the course of a two-day public programme of Incantations, we will draw on some of the central threads that have emerged during the two-year research-project We Who Are Not the Same. This project questioned existing feminist politics through a decolonial feminist lens while experimenting with and reflecting on the possibilities of building grounds “on shifting sand”, as Maya Angelou powerfully writes in her poem.

Considering the need to sit and talk, share, name, resist, build viable forms and constellations of solidarity, we would like to create a space where we can make time for one another, share each other’s experience and struggles, think together, collectively reflect on how to listen to each other (a quest we have been challenged with repeatedly); how to facilitate forms of transmission; produce echoes and resonances.  How do we enable the transmission of affects such as longing and desire as well as shared precariousness and distorted histories? How does contemporary art become a space where such a dialogue can take place, changing our attitude toward the world?