statecraft workshop

That Art Whereby the State Transacts with the Dead

The workshop will comprise: a presentation and discussion session; a close reading of two pre-set texts; a close reading of two works of art; and a collaborative writing process.

Part 1: When the State Imagines How the Dead Belong Within It: Presentation of works that variously open up the question of how art operates as one of the sites where the state enacts a form of community with the dead, from the memorialisation of the fallen hero to the projection of future horizons of human and non-human death.

Part 2: Being with the Dead: A close reading session. Working in break-out groups the participants are asked to unpack the different rhetorical forms through which community with the dead is imagined in two texts that bridge between political theology and contemporary cultural practice.

Part 3: Inclusive Exclusions of the Dead: A session on group discussion and close analysis of works of art as sites where the dead are brought into relationship with the living and the question of the agency of the dead with respect to the state.

Part 4: “Bully’s Acre” Writing workshop: To collectively write a short text that reprises some of these themes.

Readings

Robin Runabout (1831) “Meditations in Bully’s Acre,” The National Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 451-454 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30058474?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Thom van Dooren (2014) “Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World” in Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, University Press Scholarship Online, pp. 124-144. https://www.academia.edu/19177771/Mourning_crows_Grief_and_extinction_in_a_shared_world

Banu Bargu (2016) “Another Necropolitics” Theory & Event Supplement, Baltimore Vol. 19, Iss. 1.

Mick Wilson (2019) “To Live the Coming Death,” Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas (eds.), Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019, pp. 165-179. https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/to-live-the-coming-death/