Rupert’s Public Programme: Mijke van der Drift ‘Embracing the Void: Lucretius and the Magic of Social Change’
Rupert is pleased to present a talk by philosopher and educator Mijke van der Drift as part of the Public Programme.
The event will take place at the cultural and concert venue Lukiškių kalėjimas 2.0 on Saturday July 31, 2021 at 18:00.
After the lecture, at 20:00, Los Angeles-based artist and musician Tyler Matthew Oyer will present a new performance VENUS concluding their two-month residency at Rupert. Lecture and multimedia performance will seek to create a conceptual and spatial dialogue under common struggle towards social change, anti-patriarchy and femme liberation.
The entrance to the event is free of charge.
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In this talk Mijke van der Drift will address social change through the philosophy of flux of Lucretius. Lucretius, one of the early atomists, offers a material account of social change, rather than an account that relies on divine interventions. While current ways of organising life need to change, new social forms are not readily available or even able to be imagined clearly, such as what happens in the case of abolition of prisons. Working for social change seems to require a larger than human faith in the potential for making a difference. In that sense, social change relies on magical thinking, yet requires the, often hard, work of social organising. Mijke van der Drift will discuss this balancing act between material change and magical thinking as a form of ethics. Contrary to idealist ethics that specifies principles in advance magical thinking relies on openness and embracing the unknown, or in Lucretius words: embracing the void.
Mijke van der Drift is a philosopher and educator working on ethics, trans studies, technology, and anti-colonial philosophy. Mijke lectures at KABK, the Hague, the Royal College of Art, London, and contributes to the Revolutionary Papers Project at the University of Cambridge. Mijke’s work has appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, in various independent publications as well as chapters in The Emergence of Trans (Routledge 2020), and The New Feminist Literary Studies Reader (Cambridge UP 2020). Van der Drift is currently working with the collective FuturoBuku on a performance project in Kyiv titled Sambatas Stagings, and a project titled Extractivism, Datafication, and Transformative Justice. With Nat Raha, Mijke is working on a book project, titled Trans Femme Futures.
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Address: Lukiškių kalėjimas 2.0, Lukiškių skg. 6, Vilnius 01108
Rupert’s activities are supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture
Co-organiser: Lukiškių kalėjimas 2.0
Graphic design: Taktika Studio
Thank you: Violetta Pilecka, Kristijonas Gutauskas, Liza Mišeikytė