Rupert Reading Session #7 Loren Britton & Romi Ron Morrison: Concretizing Connections: Making Tangiblities

Rupert continues its monthly reading sessions! Every month, a member of Rupert’s team or an invited guest selects material to discuss. The reading sessions are open to anyone by registration.

The seventh of Rupert’s online reading sessions will take place on Big Blue Button, November 17th, 18:00 EET

Concretizing Connections: Making Tangiblities
In this session artist-researchers Loren Britton & Romi Ron Morrison will lead a reading session exploring lines of connection that refuse, enact, and engage in interdependencies. This sesssion asserts that we are all dependent on each other and connected in our existence, feeling out modes of communication, possibilities for life, and contingent survival. We will study Interdependency through the works of Abdoumaliq Simone’s Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South and M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. By reading across these two scholar’s texts we will attend to overlaps. We will “concretize new lines of connection” (Simone) and sit with crossings where “judicious vigilance needs always to be exercised.” (Alexander). We will gesture to collectivities that ask “How does spiritual work produce the conditions that bring about realignment of the self with the self, which is simultaneoulsy a realignment of oneself with the Divine through collectivity?” (Alexander). And snuggle in with “the notion of “collective” not as a coherent entity but as something more diffracted and superpositional.” (Simone) Studying how the mutual connections of one thing by another and how all things come into being in a system of dependence on others. Interdependency is a question of living together, inhabiting contradiction, committing to connection in non-predefined forms and practicing supportive architectures that feel, enclosures that fall, and relationships that transform.
There will be a maximum of 20 registrations for the reading session, selected on a first come first serve basis. Extracts from the texts and a Big Blue Button Link will be sent to registered participants.

Bios:

Romi Morrison is an artist working across critical data studies, black feminist praxis, and geography. Focusing on boundaries, social infrastructure, and community technology, they engage informal practices of knowing and representing space beyond modes of enclosure that capture land into property, people into subjects, and knowledge into data. They are currently a PhD candidate in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. https://elegantcollisions.com/

Loren Britton is an artist working with critical pedagogy, unlearning and unruly matter(s); they make objects that re-position and collaborations that unlearn. Britton is responsible to matters of anti-racism, trans*feminist-techno-science, and making accessibilities (considering class and dis/ability). Britton researches within Gender/Diversity in Informatics Systems Department at the University of Kassel, DE. More at: https://lorenbritton.com/

Registration: https://forms.gle/Esp1gvBNPrEqVw49A

Accessibility: We would like to make the workshop accessible for people with disabilities, this can include multiple strategies for reducing barriers. Please let us know if Rupert can help find ways of greater access. Our print materials will be in English, if you use a screen reader, we can email you some screen-reader friendly digital versions, please email – hello@lorenbritton.com.

Rupert’s activities are supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.