IN THE NAMES OF…:
Re/In/Citing Politics Beyond Capital and Colony
Hic Rosa Studio 2018
May 20-26, 2018
Brno, Czech Republic
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Citing calls, honours, summons, locates, remembers, accuses, and it also produces genealogies and tangles of knowledge, feeling, and meaning. It names resonances, verbalises hauntings, acknowledges debt, claims community, and establishes inheritances. It alleges meaning, and is itself a practice of allegiance and filiality. It extracts but can also extort. It appropriates, but can also misappropriate and expropriate. Its lack can be theft, but its presence can be a betrayal at times. Its absence can be equalising in an unequal world, and protective in dangerous contexts, but can also disappear those already overwritten as producers in systems of power and meaning. Certain prescribed and professionalised practices of citation in art and scholarship traditionally demarcate the terrain as one of proprietary relations, beholden to the capitalist law of value and a colonial tradition of mastery. Needful reparations for what Lewis Gordon names “citational apartheid,” and the wishful recoveries of life maimed by institutions, raise the question of which codes must be followed, overloaded, rewritten, violated, or broken entirely–and when, and by whom.
What new sensibilities do incite and recite–as emissaries from other worlds of reading, claiming, affiliating, declaiming, authorising, announcing, pronouncing–convene for us? In assembling different enunciations of presence and authority, these riffs on citation make available not only who is cited or not, but also who is citing and as what. Thus are raised questions of responsibility and answerability to something–perhaps unnamed, unspoken, and uncited– that exists beyond what and who is cited and what and who cites. What, if anything, is to be done with this?
The 2nd Hic Rosa Studio in Materialist and Decolonial (MAD) Politics and Aesthetics is built around the themes of re/in/citation as a way to examine the relation between our politics and our aesthetics in a materialist, uncolonial, and unfascist vein–and to map out the coordinates of form, content, and method in our various labours that may allow us to think of decolonising beyond delinking, hospitality beyond occupation, filiality beyond appropriation, inquiry beyond settlement, solidarity beyond confession, authoring beyond authority, presence beyond immediacy, abundance beyond superfluity, and history beyond debt.
The 2018 Studio, organised by Hic Rosa Collective, and co-hosted by the Moravian Gallery (http://www.moravska-galerie.cz), Bard College at Simon’s Rock (www.simons-rock.edu), and Masaryk University (www.muni.cz), will take place on May 20-26 in Brno, Czech Republic. It will involve a five-day study retreat, followed by a two-day conference with broader attendance that will allow participants to receive feedback on connected projects on which they are currently working. The Studio week will be punctuated by plenaries and public events. Dispensing with standard academic distinctions and displacing traditional hierarchies, the Studio welcomes all critical and political thinkers. Our collaborative learning and investigation thrives on a mutual accountability sustained by and in our multiplicity. Artists, writers, graduate students, postdocs, advanced undergraduates, professors, and independent researchers are invited to apply.
Expressions of interest and proposals are invited for participation either in the entire Studio (which includes the study retreat and the conference), or only in the Conference.
THE STUDY RETREAT: The study retreat is an opportunity for a limited number of participants to engage with each other and the featured works of thinkers, artists, and scholars who have moved and intrigued us in relation to the theme of the Studio, and the organisers will put together reading lists for study inspired by those engagements. Our collaborative learning and investigation thrives on a mutual accountability sustained by and in our multiplicity.
THE CONFERENCE: The conference will convene a larger intellectual community, where participants (study retreat participants and many others joining for the conference) will have a chance to contribute their own projects at any stage of completion. The conference setting will be repurposed as an active commons of thinking with, and being with, within which participants will present their work and attend to each other’s work with attentiveness and reciprocity in relation to larger arcs of objectives, method, questions, and concerns, and without the pressure of a dictated productivist finality. We understand this as a space where creative solidarities across varying immediate political contexts can help us imagine different mannerisms and ends for intellectual and artistic labour than those usually assigned by the university and society. We imagine panels and presentations punctuated by sessions of collective reading and discussion that will intermittently return us to a plenary space. For the conference, we invite papers and presentations in diverse genres, formats, and mediums that respond to elements of our provocation above, and/or those which might illuminate any aspect of it by way of the following topics:
- Form and style in relation to citation
- Histories and counter-histories of citation
- Intellectual debt and study
- Method and citation in different genres of expression
- Re/citation, belief, and democratic politics beyond/against the secular
- Refusal, withholding, and critique of citation
- Arguments for and against reparative citation
- Group writing and collective action
- Intellectual property and communist practice
- Practices of de-sedimenting and de-provincialising the exception or the disappeared
- Virality and loss of accreditation
- Silencing versus silences chosen to be kept
- Origins vs. sources of thought
- Deference versus validation in citation
- Citations across political movements and new totalities
- Litigiousness and worldmaking
- Translation as appearance and disappearance
English will be the primary medium of conversation at the Studio.
Bard College at Simon’s Rock will underwrite academic credit for attending the Studio for undergraduates if needed. Please contact aabbas@simons-rock.edu for more information.
Program Convenors
Asma Abbas (Hic Rosa Collective and Bard College at Simon’s Rock), Iva Smidova (Masaryk University), and Ewa Macura-Nnamdi (University of Silesia)
The Studio Organising Committee is composed of several members of the Hic Rosa Collective. (www.hicrosa.org )
Proposal and Costs
Please submit proposals for your participation Studio or Conference here
STUDIO (Study and Conference):
The registration fee for the 2018 Studio, which includes participation in the study and presentation at the conference, will be $300. This includes materials, coffee breaks, and two collective dinners. Partial tuition remission will be considered in certain cases. Please contact us with any questions.
While Studio participants are encouraged to arrange their own housing, we have reserved a block of apartments in the centre of Brno. A few independent and shared apartments are available, on a first-come first-serve basis. Per person housing costs for the 8 nights of the Studio are as follows (date and price adjustments are not possible) :
Single occupancy $ 340
Double occupancy (per person) $ 180
Triple occupancy(per person) $ 125
Quad occupancy (per person) $ 100
On the proposal form, please specify if you’d like to be considered for one of the options above. We might be able to offer some alternatives if we cannot accommodate you in these room/price combinations.
CONFERENCE only:
The registration fee for conference presenters will be $125. This includes materials, coffee breaks, and one collective dinner. Please contact us with any questions or request for a sliding scale. Registration for presenters is required by March 1, 2018. We are unable to arrange lodging for conference participants, but will happily share recommendations if asked. Booking.com and airbnb.com have been helpful sites in our experience.
PROPOSAL DEADLINE AND FEE SCHEDULE
The deadline for submission of proposals is January 15, 2018. We will respond to your submission by February 15, 2018.
Non-refundable payment for the program registration fees (and partially refundable housing fees if applicable for Studio participants) will be due by March 1, 2018. The final program will be disseminated no later than April 1, 2018.