All and at once

Why won’t the idea of the particle or individual seem to go away? What becomes of movement once stripped of development? What can a human be without its crutches of life-time and measure? And what then becomes of our molten ethics when stripped of its value form? If in order to represent something you inflect your position or agenda on it, and if some phenomena do not have properties until we try and observe them, is the measurement problem in filmmaking and quantum physics analogous? Does fundamental particle physics and the ethics these artists and thinkers are interested in propose a reality that both goes beyond relationality and speaks more of a kind of oneness? How might that change ideas such as consent, which liberalism based on individuals agreeing to their relations? And how do Denise and Arjuna, Fred and Wu embody or apply these kinds of ideas within the topography of their artmaking collaborations?

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Denise Ferreira da Silva is a Brazilian philosopher, ethicist and artist, tarot reader, reiki master, student of unreasonable knowledges, and a Gemini. Her book Toward a Global Idea of Race asks “why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of colour, is there no ethical outrage?” and presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space.

Denise was present at Episode 6: Make a Way Out of No Way and participated in the programme for Episode 7: We Can’t Live Without Our Lives with Valentina Desideri.

If you ask him, Fred Moten might say that what people often think of as his poetic and philosophical thinking and writing — about fugitivity, blackness, blur — isn’t his at all. It’s better conceived as a temporary and fleeting emanation of open-ended friendships within the black radical tradition; queer and indigenous worldviews; the music of blackness; and sites of care. Most often, these have included Stefano Harney, Laura Harris or Wu Tsang, but also hundreds of others.

Fred has participated in Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle and Episode 6: Make a Way Out of No Way as well as at Arika’s week of events, A survey is a process of listening, at the Whitney Biennial in 2012.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. He works with the essay form with a multiperspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological.

Wu Tsang is a filmmaker and performance artist who combines documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical detours into the imaginary in works that explore hidden histories, marginalised narratives, and the act of performing itself. Tsang re-imagines racialised, gendered representations beyond the visible frame to encompass the multiple and shifting perspectives through which we experience the social realm.

Wu took part in Episode 9: Other World’s Already Exist and presented an iteration of their ongoing performance cycle, Moved by the Motion.

Image Description: A shot of murky green and brown water with several rectangular bricks submerged.