
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.
With these theme we want to set work that doesn’t seem to fit close to or in any category at all alongside work that deals explicitly with category and practices of categorising, or escaping category. A couple of suggestions for starting to investigate this theme could be Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio’s performed film lecture about Caribbean cinema and Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman disucssing what it might mean to be fugitive.
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?
Profound mathematical ideas for romantics, to help us linger in the difference we share.
Do ideas emerging from particle physics help to re-think of blackness as a mode of life in which it’s possible to practice difference without separation?
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?
4 days of performances, discussions, workshops, screenings with mutant dancers, prison abolitionist poets, transfeminist revolutionaries, haunted noise, science fiction, sex worker resistance, crip erotics, radical pornography and militant fiction.
Inspired by Delany’s Aye, and Gomorra. A spookily filmic world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction of their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.
Could cruising and random public sex be the basis of an ethically organised society? A discussion with Jackie Wang, Samuel R. Delany and Huw Lemmey.
Chip will read some of his great literary pornography, which pushes sexuality to the point of extremity and exhaustion.
Chip’s written some of the greatest of all Sci-Fi and Fantasy—page turning character driven diamond-hard novels and short stories: each a lens that refracts our real-life struggles and desires.
Juliana’s performances chart the dissonant space and discrepancy between the presumed fixed norms of social life and the fluid lived experience those norms don’t allow for.
What does it mean to resist seeking assimilation or inclusion within, or let our demands be co-opted by the very systems we seek to dismantle?