to ask what else: six talks

 

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Friday, November 14 at 7pm for to ask what else, featuring presentations by Joanna Evans, Sahar Khraibani, Stella Liantonio, Iulia Nistor, Adrienne Jacobson Oliver, and Stephen Woo.

This event sees six friends—writers, poets and theorists—asking “what else?” of their critical practices and investments. Rethinking established concepts and routinized gestures (such as work, language, and looking), they forge critical, bodily, and imaginative openings in tight places. The attentive curiosity of “what else” yields sometimes counterintuitive findings, such as ambivalence around dichotomies of labor/ease or returned colonial artifacts, the carceral implications of ecology, the absurd linguistic nationalism of fascist Italy, the inferential structure of meaning, and the refusal of repair and cure. In flesh, fantasy, imagination, and the incalculable—to ask what else searches for perceptual terminology that sustains, rather than forecloses, indeterminacy. 

Program

Sahar Khraibani
always already in: notes on labor and the body
This text delves into the fantasies of eradicating fatigue from the body which are inseparable from the fantasies aroused by the rejection of misery as tied to a certain conception of the ideal worker. Presented in three parts, the text engages poetic resonances and fragments to argue for the refusal of labor.

Stephen Woo
Contradictions of Return and Repair
This presentation thinks alongside the film Dahomey (dir. Mati Diop, 2024), which follows the return of 26 cultural artifacts that were stolen by France from what is now the Republic of Benin. It reflects upon impossible and contradictory desires of postcolonial return and repair that Dahomey interrogates and itself stages aesthetically in the mode of fantasy.

Joanna Evans
Abolitionist Architecture, or why “eco” can’t do what we want it to
Evans explores the 12 year architectural collaboration between incarcerated Black Panther Herman Wallace and his friend, the artist Jackie Sumell. Their detailed, imaginative planning of “Herman’s House” surfaces a historical critique of the origins of ecology and its proximity to economic logics, and global capitalism in particular.

Stella Liantonio
Tied tongues
This text investigates how Fascist-era regulations on language shape artistic production in contemporary Italy. It analyzes works that engage with public space to reclaim histories deliberately omitted from the national narrative.

Iulia Nistor
given/made
This talk is part of a larger project which identifies the distinction between “given” and “made” as a dichotomy of our thinking, and explores the capacity of artworks to question this binary.

Adrienne Jacobson Oliver
free state
Exploring resonance with/in blackened histories, free state investigates how B/blackness articulates itself in vernacular, sensual, and sonic anarrangements. Orchestrating “Sankofic attunement”—a critically erotic listening positionality of B/black maternality in the afterlives of reproductive enslavement—this text reads the American South as a condition, silence as dialect, and imagines non-curative poetics.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility            
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.       
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.