Discussion on Mathopoetics
Fred Moten Fernando Zalamea
A back and forth between Fred and Fernando on the transits and obstructions between mathematics and poetics, and how both help us to think from the other side.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
A back and forth between Fred and Fernando on the transits and obstructions between mathematics and poetics, and how both help us to think from the other side.
How do poetry and maths stitch together pictures of our fractured situation from its wreckage and relics, from the debris of hope and the well of residues that make us what we are?
How do we sense entanglement? Can the knotting of ropes according to a poem’s rhythm make the social pulse of language matter?
Gravitational Feel is an engine for intensifying the differentiation of our entanglement, which you continually reprogramme in the mutual rub, shift and lap of its sonic, wooden, steel, textile and human material.
Why won’t the idea of the particle or individual go away? Is the measurement problem in physics a documentary film issue? What can a human be without its crutches of life-time and measure?
Can our favourite Vegas-born poet of prophetic blackness and a South Central transmuter of social rage into beauty feel through each other?
A discussion about what is at stake in the performance of realness and the practice of passing, and how they are both acts of survival and resistance.
An open conversation hosted by Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten around ‘fugitivity’ and ‘waywardness’ and what it means to be in flight, excessive or ungovernable.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.