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READING CIRCLE w/ Vika Kirchenbauer

14. September 2017 11:30

Until September 5th, registration is open for our two Reading Circle Sessions on September 14th and September 15 during the Odarodle Symposium, hosted by artist, writer and music producer Vika Kirchenbauer. If you want to attend, please register at research@schwulesmuseum.de. The participants will be sent links to the four texts and are expected to read them in advance (~eg 50 Pages in total). Printed copies will be available at the workshop. The total number of participants is limited to 15. Both sessions take place on September 14th and 15th between 11am and 2pm at Schwules Museum.

“I decided against an artist talk in favour of a reading circle because I believe the questions arising from the exhibition urge for mutual engagement rather than a lecture format. Four texts will be discussed that reflect not my mastery and expertise, but that can serve as cornerstones for stimulating conversations to be had amongst a group of people with different perspectives.

The first session focuses on Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” and Édouard Glissant’s “For Opacity”, since both essays fundamentally question thought practices habitual to critical theory and leftist political discourse, making room to refigure such naturalised approaches. Then, for the second session, Wendy Brown’s “Resisting Left Melancholy” will be juxtaposed with an excerpt from Paul Gilroy’s “Postcolonial Melancholia” as together they help complicate notions around disavowed forms of political affect. Because, as becomes clear, through melancholy the West simultaneously accesses a strategy to detach itself from dealing with its imperial and colonial history as well as a means to remain attached to its own (un)dead past.”