One way to talk about art is to talk about drumming. Percussive polyrhythms and percussive ensembles provide a framework for thinking about aesthetic, expressive, political, and curatorial forms more broadly.

By looking at some of the ways in which different languages use metaphors to predicate time, the presentation will address the relationship between this diversity of metaphors and the possibility of elaborating collective aesthetics of the earth that would be distinct from art produced within the capitalist system. How might such aesthetics inform what could be called an “indigenous futurism”?

The antioxidant is a technical and cultural object of the early twentieth century. Originally pursued in the context of preventing image decay in photograph fixation, the chemistry of delaying rancidity, heading of rubber deterioration, and preventing explosions in oil transport took the form of making or finding specific molecules with antioxidant properties that could be added to both diets and industrial products. This led to the commercial development between 1930 and 1950 of many natural antioxidant commodities such as Vitamin E, and synthetic ones such as BHT and ethoxyquin, still widely used today. The study of oxidative stress arose in this hybrid petro-animal body of duration, simultaneously a concern about atomic radiation exposure, radical oxygen species, and cancer in human cells, and a concern about commodity lifespan. Today, synthetic antioxidants are pervasive in the environment and natural antioxidants prop up the promissory economies of health foods, rejuvenating cosmetics, and bio-based production systems. As we begin to ask whether our material things are lasting too long - or not long enough - and the technical parameters of decay figure prominently in negotiations of aging, biodegradability and toxicity, it is useful to engage directly with the history and future of these techniques and technologies of rancidity and lifespan, into which so many values and temporalities are built.

Remembering that poiesis means "to make," Layli Long Soldier will discuss visual art installations and projects that have led to work on the page—how and why this was necessary, how or why language was inadequate as the medium for first utterance. Likewise, she will share ways in which collaboration, community, and research in visual art making have shifted a writing practice out of isolation into connection with others.

This talk explores what appears, what is lost, and what could be reimagined in the process of researching African and African-descendant people in the history of art. The focus is a portrait from the Danish colonial archive, representing a young woman called Justina Antoine. She was an Afro-Caribbean nanny to the Marstrand family, whose presence in the genre of Danish portraiture is rare. Her representation as a figure of interest in Danish art raises critical questions about the ways in which Black people are visualized as evidence of colonial encounters. Using the wider cultural archive to complicate our relationship to, and understanding of, her imaging, the talk reconsiders how we come to look at the past, and what we do in/with those moments of contact.

My work is about historical memory and the efforts of the Cuban political power structures to impose official narratives of the revolution that are rife with structured absences. I employ a range of aesthetic strategies to explore how Cuban intellectuals have confronted the state and how the state has treated its intellectuals. In my discussion I will focus on the intersection of historical memory, graphic design, conceptualism, and activism to reveal the inner workings of cultural policies implemented by socialist administrations. Those policies have engendered opposition from artists and intellectuals to this day.

From archeological contexts to urban studies, the idea of the palimpsest is often invoked to denote the layered quality of certain artifacts and spaces. Whether deployed as a metaphor or to denote a physical quality, the idea of the palimpsest relates the materiality of mark-making to the more abstract realm of temporality. The palimpsest is heterochronous, marked by the co-existent traces of two or more moments. In its materiality and temporality, the palimpsest shares aspects of the assemblage. But it also often implies an over-writing or re-writing in which practices and strategies of negation or co-option are inseparable from the articulation of power. The talk will consider questions of temporality and visibility raised by a range of palimpsest objects, and their potential implications for current debates about the legacy of ethically or politically problematic monuments.

What can a trained architect bring to the study of colonial history? What would the concept of space-time, if taken seriously, bring to our study of and struggle against colonialism? By way of spatial analysis, Léopold Lambert examines 74 years of occupation of Palestine as well as the various movements of liberation that challenged French colonialism — in particular the 1954-62 Algerian Revolution, the 1984-88 Kanak insurrection, and the 2005 banlieues uprising — in order to reflect on what constitutes the colonial continuum as a surface of space-time, and how to represent it in maps and diagrams.

Even as Jean-Michel Basquiat's imagery has become commonplace and biographical narratives continue to be produced and reproduced, the artwork's critical substance gets lost. Basquiat critiqued the very system that extracts and manipulates Black genius and the people who profit from it: from the corporate collector who will pay anything to authenticate forgeries to the academic scholars who will ensure that transaction; or the curators who attempt to possess Basquiat as if he is territory to be claimed; to the playwrights and screenwriters reinventing narratives with bold conjecture. What if this level of exploitation is just par for the course for a famous artist? Is it reasonable to object if Basquiat was just as ambitious as the actors above? This lecture plays against the paradox of Basquiat and the mounting stakes of his legacy.

‘De Profundis’ are the first two words of Psalm 130, a most poignant song that is a call for help from out of the depths of ruins. Is the world in trouble? Yes. Are we caught up in the roiling and churning? Indeed. So many of the old demons, including the threat of nuclear annihilation, are roaming the earth again. What do we do when confronted by immense forces that are likely to engulf us? Among the many options, is that of witness. We witness to the ways the world's forces array themselves in some intense battle against truth and reality. What do we trust? How do we act? In the aftermath of a world determined on a course of ruin, what endures? This reflection explores the idea of what and how we see, or choose to see and act in a world now marked by doubt, fear, mistrust, and cynicism. What edifices of being will a surviving generation inherit, and what will they note about those who extended to them an inheritance of brokenness?

In this lecture I explore the entwined affective and metric economies of dividuals. To explain state violence directed at individuals, there is often recourse to the presumed relay of humanism: the perpetrators dehumanize, or have never humanized, populations of said individuals. Liberal debates about humanizing targets of violence, however, do little to help us comprehend dividuals as units of computational governance. Dividualization does not rehearse the primacy of human forms and in fact exploits humanist attachments to these forms. What is at stake in untangling the workings of the dividual? What is the corporeal in these dividual processes? Following technoscience inquiries but also expanding them to think about how computational governance is both felt and lived, I am interested in how dividualization is both digital and of the flesh, involving series of recursive relationalities as well as a way of “unseeing” and re-seeing corporeality.

How can built environments reveal subjugated stories of the past? How are we affected by the historical traces and ghosts that linger in our dwelling places? How are race, gender, class, and disability embedded in architecture? How might we ultimately understand ourselves as artifacts of space and place as we make and tell histories otherwise? This meditation moves across various architectural sites to weave minoritized histories across time and space, using the figure of the nest as a dwelling place that resists the colonial force of history.