Choreographies of the Archipelago: Artists in Conversation

How do singular, dispersed artistic gestures teach us ways of listening, touching, and assembling across distance and difference? How can interdisciplinary performance practices articulate the felt and embodied relations of global uprisings happening both through and against the networked ecologies that capitalize on our attention? Staging a series of conversations, Choreographies of the Archipelago invites artists who work across a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary contexts to reflect on both their shared and differing understanding of what vital concerns, methods, and gestures are called for by the pressing challenges faced at both local and transnational levels. From the immediacy of state violence and the rise of autocracy, to the ongoing and ever intensifying struggle against the separatist and extractive logics of capitalist and colonialist regimes, art’s world-making capacity has never been more essential to forging a collective future. These dialogues invite artists to discuss how their creative and critical practices may participate in this diverse endeavor, while pushing back against the demand that art serves as a symbol of global salvation.

The title of the event draws on Édouard Glissant’s foresight that “the entire world is becoming an archipelago” to reaffirm the necessity of thinking singularities in common while resisting epistemological fixity and political homogeneity. Instead of dictating a way forward, these online dialogues emerge as a score for movement and variation; they stage a virtual rehearsal for the metamorphosis of an era and the dissolution of a stable paradigm of “the global.”

Featuring:

mayfield brooks & Yasuko Yokoshi
December 3, 7pm EST / December 4, 9am JST

Okwui Okpokwasili & Tanya Lukin Linklater
December 4, 3pm EST

Arkadi Zaides & Ligia Lewis
December 5, 12pm EST / 6pm CET

Eleonora Fabião & Jelili Atiku
December 6, 12pm EST / 6pm WAT