Future Ruins: transfeminism, austerity and the archives

Jay Bernard, Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift will discuss the archives as a means to question futurity. Drawing on poetics, film and multilogical ethics, they will question disappearances of social knowledge; intergenerational organising within radical communities; queer and trans (of colour) disruptions of archives; and the possibilities for translations of past events to present practices. Wavering between fragmented understandings and different operational logics of actions, knowledges and affects, radical transfeminism aims to hold the space for finding relations between the ruins of the everyday. Emerging from the debris, spaces for politics find form as poetics to carry understandings, actions and be/longings.

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Jay Bernard is a writer from London. Their work is interdisciplinary, critical, queer and rooted in the archive. They won the 2018 Ted Hughes Award for Surge: Side A, a cross-disciplinary exploration of the New Cross Fire in 1981. Jay’s short film Something Said has screened in the UK and internationally, including Aesthetica and Leeds International Film Festival (where it won best experimental and best queer short respectively), Sheffield DocFest and CinemAfrica. Jay is a programmer at BFI Flare, an archivist at Mayday Rooms and resident artist at Raven Row.

Mijke van der Drift works on Nonnnormative Ethics which engages with the question how forms of life outside of the dominant norm find ways of relation and evaluation. Together with Nat Raha and Chryssy Hunter, Mijke has been working internationally on Radical Transfeminism. Their current project The Logic of Loss in Bonding uses film and philosophy to formulate a counterpoint to managerial theories of accumulation. Their film A way of dying… (2017), co-directed with Alex Reuter, is touring. In addition, van der Drift is currently working on their book Nonnormative Ethics: The Dynamics of Trans Formation.

“Nat Raha has written some of the most exciting poetry of the last decade. Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary – with great quickness and nimble intensity, her syllables and survival codes dash through police-lines as high-level transmissions signalling absolute solidarity, insisting that other lives are still possible…They are poems that break open a space in which to think through what has happened, who we have been, and what has been done to us. These are fearsome times. Raha writes poetry that acknowledges that fear and refuses to flinch in the face of it, which is in itself an act of the fiercest solidarity.” – Sean Bonney

Nat participated in Episode 9: Other World’s Already Exist.

Video for this event is coming soon.

Image Description: An urban scene, a sunbed salon. It has a maroon shop sign with the text CONSOL written in white cursive along the top of its window. In the window, there are 7 heart decals, each in rainbow colours. In the middle a pink circle with yellow text reads: ALL BEDS 50P ON SUNDAYS.