Artist Talk and Listening Session Difusiones with Denise Ferreira da Silva • Arjuna Neuman • Lama El Khatib • Sam Nimmrichter • Nicole L‘Huillier
The talk takes place in cooperation with Tanzquartier Wien and will be hosted by Anna Leon (Tanzquartier Wien) and Andrea Popelka (Kunsthalle Wien).
Free admission.
The talk will be held in English.
Colonial violence is not in the past: It is still with and among us, inscribed in the very materiality of contemporaneity. The natural materials and slave labor forcefully extracted by European imperialism have not disappeared. They remain transformed into capital – the same capital that continues to profit from the labor of disproportionately imprisoned Black people and lands claimed by indigenous communities.
(How) Can this debt ever be repaid? In their collaborative artistic work, philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva and artist-author Arjuna Neuman reflect on decolonization as, in da Silva’s words, ‘the restoration of the total value extracted from Native Lands and expropriated from Slave Labour’. Defying universalist norms of thought established by the European Enlightenment, da Silva and Neuman counter the linearity of history and the separation of space to interrogate the presence of colonialism now, here, with us.
Lama El Khatib and Sam Nimmrichter will be in conversation with the artists to continue their thoughts. The discussion will be accompanied by somatic exercises by Daliah Touré and a listening session to facilitate a layered collective study. No prior knowledge needed.
The listening session Difusiones by Nicole L’Huillier will be centered around sonic works and textures that relate to or come from the Atacama territory, the artist’s work around vibrational membranes, and from outdoor improvisation sessions with custom-made listening and sounding apparatuses. This diffusion proposes arrangements of crackling minerals and saturated hums from the desert’s winds in dialogue with other voices, resonances, and sounds that collectively stir up the wind in indissoluble events of multiphonic frequencies, generative interferences, and vibrational narratives. Difusiones will also be broadcasted live as a pirate radio station with the aim of strengthening its diffuse and spread spirit in the surrounding electromagnetic airwaves space.
The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at the University of New York. Her artistic and academic work reflects and speculates on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism.
Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer, working with the essay form, in which ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic, and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological.
Lama El Khatib is a writer and cultural worker, working at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin as a curatorial coordinator, researcher, and producer since 2018. Her work draws on abolitionist traditions and is invested in the poetics of ‘the labour of the dead’.
Sam Nimmrichter is a theorist, writer, and researcher at FU Berlin, interested in questions of instrumentality, speculation and their entanglement with histories of colonialism and raciality.
Nicole L’Huillier is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her practice centers on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity, and the activation of a vibrational imagination. Her work materializes through installations, sonic/vibrational sculptures, custom-made (listening and/or sounding) apparatuses, performances, experimental compositions, membranal poems, and writing.
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