The Breath Between Words

Friday, February 13, 10–11:30am | Taft Research Center | Register

A conversation between artists/scholars Leniqueca Welcome and Audra Wolowiec on the limits of language, the unsaid, and the undone. Drawing inspiration from Welcome’s collages that uncover and play with the “unseen” and Wolowiec’s installations and scores that transform breath, stutter, and pause into spaces of relation, playing with the “unheard,” this discussion will ask:  What does it mean to listen to the unsayable? What are the limits of what can be said or seen? How does the body through sound or writing becomes an instrument of history?

Leniqueca Welcome is a visual artist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at The George Washington University. She is currently working on her monograph, Come Out of This World: Postcolonial Statecraft and Antiblack Policing in Trinidad. 

Audra Wolowiec is an artist and educator based in New York. Her work with sound and the material qualities of language extend from the embodied experience of dysfluent speech, drawing from traditions of experimental notation and visual poetry. 

Mind the Gap: Sound, Image, Print, and Collective Methods for Writing Otherwise is a three-part series that brings together scholars, artists, makers, and publishers to contemplate what it means to work through archival and institutional gaps and how to do it collaboratively. Embracing the unsaid, unmade, and undone, the series frames the “gap” as a productive opening and collaboration as a worldmaking mode of working with and for one another.  

Writing Collaboratively, Publishing Independently

Friday, February 20, 12–1:30pm, Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam | Register

A conversation on the (a)symmetries of collaborating and publishing Glossary of Insomnia with anthropologist and co-author Alexandra Dantzer, interlocutor-turned-friend and co-author Aleksandar Kecman, and friend-turned-publisher Micah Weber. Discussing the process of the book’s creation over three years and across two continents, they will share their collaborative writing methods and discuss the broader landscape of independent publishing. 

Alexandra Dantzer is a cultural anthropologist working with multimodal methods contributing to critical conversations in medical anthropology, temporality, and urban life. Aleksandar Kecman is an actor based in Belgrade. Now posing as a writer. And vice versa. Micah Weber is an artist or filmmaker based in Braddock, Pennsylvania. They co-run the publishing project, Huner Francis, a slow/small imprint with an interest in film, poetry, and sound.

Mind the Gap: Sound, Image, Print, and Collective Methods for Writing Otherwise is a three-part series that brings together scholars, artists, makers, and publishers to contemplate what it means to work through archival and institutional gaps and how to do it collaboratively. Embracing the unsaid, unmade, and undone, the series frames the “gap” as a productive opening and collaboration as a worldmaking mode of working with and for one another.  

The World According to Sound

Monday, February 16, 7:30pm, Patricia Corbett Theater, 290 CCM Blvd. | Register
 
Surrounded by an octophonic ring of powerful loudspeakers, you are going to sit in the dark for 70 minutes, wear an eye mask, and be taken on a sonic trip that asks you to rethink the world through your ears instead of your eyes. You’ll hear everything from the vibrations of the Golden Gate Bridge, footsteps of ants, and ancient Latin, to the first piece of musique concrete, recordings of Berlin made in 1930, a sonified essay about the gendering of glial cells, and the theory of how push buttons and Tupperware act as media objects. Through these sound pieces, the show examines how our attention is often directed toward very specific modes of understanding, while other ways of knowing are left out. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with co-producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett are co-producers of Ways of Knowing, a podcast series made in partnership with academic institutions like Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and The University of Washington. They have published academic papers; spent a semester at Cornell University as practitioners-in-residence; and performed their octophonic audio compositions at more than 75 universities, theaters, and art spaces. They previously worked in public radio, where their reporting won two Edward R. Murrow Awards for excellence in sound design and was featured regularly on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, The World, Science Friday, and other nationally-syndicated radio programs. Learn more at https://www.theworldaccordingtosound.org/live-show. 

This event is presented in partnership with CCM, A&S, and IRiS. 

A Community Agreement

Friday, February 27, 11am, Aronofff 5401 DAAP | Register

A conversation between artists/designers Eric Von Haynes and Julia Warner on printmaking as craft and practice of community engagement and community building. Discussing recent projects that center mutual aid, slow media, and attentive listening, they will explore design’s role in creating minor archives and pose questions to the audience and one another about the transformative (and transformed) role artists and designers can play. 

Eric Von Haynes is a printmaker, designer, and publisher. He founded Flatlands Press in 2007 and directs a community-focused practice that includes experimental printmaking, artist books, and mutual aid initiatives. Julia Warner is Creative Director at Cereal Box, specializing in book design and small-edition publishing. 

Mind the Gap: Sound, Image, Print, and Collective Methods for Writing Otherwise is a three-part series that brings together scholars, artists, makers, and publishers to contemplate what it means to work through archival and institutional gaps and how to do it collaboratively. Embracing the unsaid, unmade, and undone, the series frames the “gap” as a productive opening and collaboration as a worldmaking mode of working with and for one another.  

SPRING KEYNOTE

Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time

Thursday, March 5, 6pm | The Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut St., 11th Floor | Register

Grief fundamentally fractures time. It situates us simultaneously in time and out of it. It is always deeply personal, yet it is also utterly universal. We experience it as individuals, yet it is also the great equalizer that summons us to face the limits of our mortality and the relationships that sustain us. In her talk, Tina Campt will present selections from her forthcoming book, Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time, which tells the story of how writing to art became a survival tactic that helped her grapple with intense experiences of personal grief during a period of pervasive social grievance. Focusing on what she describes as the exemplary psychic, temporal, and sensory structure of grief, the afterimage, her talk will explore how Black contemporary artists create artworks that speak beyond what we see and give expression to the absent presences that constitute some of the most palpable manifestations of grief and mourning. 

Tina Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. Her recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in black diasporic communities and the interventions of black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and holds a joint appointment between the Department of Art and Archeaology and the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Writing, Feeling, and the History of Flow

Wednesday, March 11, 12–1:30pm | Valentine Overlook, Clifton Court Hall 5280 | Register

This talk puts two problems in dialogue: first, the private misery many academics experience on a given day spent hoping our writing will “flow,” and second, the public challenge of explaining why academic expertise matters now, when so many of higher education’s resources have been blocked. These two problems bridge several perceived divides: individual and social, emotional and rational, psychological and political. Such divides are so familiar we can forget they have histories. But, they do. Indeed, the river city of Cincinnati— with its particular relation to the global flows of water, immigrants, industrial products, and ideas—has played a significant role in those histories. Taking Cincinnati as a case study, and drawing on her recent book Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now, Mesle explores how personal feelings have material, trackable, and transformable connections to our communities. She further proposes that humanists’ skills— such as our ability to historicize seemingly ephemeral experiences, like bad writing feelings— make us uniquely suited to addressing the broader crises of our period. 

Sarah Mesle is a professor, writer, and editor based in Los Angeles, California. She is faculty at USC, the former Senior Humanities Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, founding co-editor of the LARB channel Avidly and the NYU short book series Avidly Reads. Mesle’s many essays about writing, literature, gender, television, and more have appeared in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Talking Points Memo, Guernica, InStyle magazine, andThe New York Times Magazine. She is a nineteenth-century Americanist by training and is interested, generally speaking, in the long strange history of the American novel and in the many ways popular culture can excite, estrange, and surprise.

Public Collectors Publication Survey

Thursday, September 4, 4–6pm | Taft Research Center

Public Collectors has elevated subcultural, underground, marginal, amateur, and collective perspectives that many museum and institutional collections neglect. Join us for the opening reception of the publication survey and hear from Marc Fischer, the project's administrator and publisher. 

Hormonal Methods

Where does the contemporary concept of hormonal management come from? Who is perceived as hormonal and why? Whose hormone cycles are idealized and whose hormonal imbalances are criminalized, pathologized, and fetishized—and to what social and political ends? How do these relations of power manifest as visual, material objects and images? And how have artists questioned the very idea of a “hormonally constructed body” (Oudshoorn) and its biopolitical implications for knowledge, embodiment, and being? This lecture centers artists’ radical experimentation with hormonal fluctuations (related to stress, pregnancy, sleep, inflammation, gender identity, metabolism, aging, etc.) and posits that hormones don’t merely modulate our bodies, but instead function as socio-political cultural artifacts. I argue that the ways that such artifacts are manufactured and managed—through state-authorized laws as much by means of fugitive, collective aid and “off label” use—constitutes hormonality, a structural process through which the expression of hormonal management operates as a regulatory technology and a framework for solidarity work and pirate care. Through a close reading of contemporary artist, Mary Maggic’s somatic abolitionist praxis, exemplified in their Open Source Estrogen workshops, I propose a shared critical vocabulary for apprehending the state-sanctioned surveillance of hormonal knowledge and methods for coming to know collectivized hormonal experimentation long part of DIY guerrilla medicine, trans technologies, and mutual aid care networks.  

Faye Gleisser is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Critical Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is an interdisciplinary art historian and curator of 20th and 21st century art, specializing in critical historiographies of risk-taking, somatic knowledge, and the visual and material histories of racial formation, surveillance, and lawfare in art and museums. Her first book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) won the 2024 ASAP Book Prize.