
Cosmic Pessimism
Eugene Thacker
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
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A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
Location: between: the abandoned site of Parker House (ex-council office building) that became a student accommodation regeneration project, off the Dudhope roundabout; Bell Street Car Park entrance ramp and; the awkward (and otherwise used/ used otherwise) space left over between the back of Tesco’s and DW Sports on the Murraygate.
Has neoliberal capitalism locked down social experience? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures?
Camille Sapara Barton author of Tending Grief will facilitate this BIPOC only session around somatics and racial justice.
The program of composed music including Feldman’s Instruments III, Ligeti’s piece for 100 Metronomes Poeme Sympathetique, and Rebonds B by Iannis Xenakis.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
A panel exploring the poetics of abolition. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change.”
A celebration of our overabundant social entanglement and complicity, that remind us of how we can see ourselves, stripped of powers’ attempts to grasp us.
A conversation about the movement for prison abolition and refusing the logic of race and sex that underpins the criminalisation and mass incarceration of communities.
Complexly interacting colossal drones by the creator of some of the most legendary yet least heard music of the 70’s.
Somewhere between performance, stripped down theatre and an intense kind of public learning or maybe even a public hearing.
Film and sound stripped of ‘content’ and experienced spatially, to be looked at not on the screen but in the space of the gallery