Like so many events, from vacations, weddings, reunions, graduations, academic conferences, planned for 2020… and then held in 2021, 2022 or never at all, Pelion Summer Lab 4 feels haunted by its constitutive afterness: it is both late and premature. The uncanniness of such expired and not-yet-transpired events epitomizes the lack of presence/presentness “we” feel today – a disorienting sense of living after, as if everyday confronted with the imminent arrival of something that has somehow already passed us by.
PSL 2022 on the theme of After/Lives will address this pandemic-heightened sense of living-on in a haunted world and on a damaged planet. After/Lives names the line that, like a glitch, both interrupts and relays a transitional spacetime without foreseeable transition: of endurance after exhaustion, life after death, survival after extinction, emergence after submergence. Whereas the normative events mentioned at the outset presume an anthropocentric capitalist calendar, a drive to control (re)productive times, spaces, and bodies, and the civilizational conceits of an inconvenienced white privilege, PSL 2022 calls for reparative readings of the present based in experimental reckonings with colonial histories of violence and their attendant late liberal economies of ruination and abandonment. The techniques and arts of survival, of recovering and worlding with what/who has been abandoned to/as ruin, will require seeking out decolonial and fugitive knowledges with which to craft speculative socio-political infrastructures that can render far-out futures habitable and inclusive. For every after/life, an after/world.
The summer lab will be organized into three clusters - Spectrality, Ruination and Survivance - and culminate in a final public experiment designed and created by the cohort: the construction of a Shrine. We will draw on diverse bibliographies, art works, archives of critical events, bodies of research, popular culture at the intersection of cultural theory, ethnography, arts, activism and experimental humanities, related to topics and fields such as speculative anthropology, death studies, studies of the anthropocene, radical black studies, decolonial and anti-colonial optics, afrofuturism, feminisms, social movement tactics, new media studies, critical photography, forensic architecture and platform studies.
We hope the lab will be a place for you to build on and cross pollinate your passions and politics through collaboration with others. We genuinely want this lab to be a healing time, a place to become unstuck, a framework for rethinking thinking and decolonizing knowledge, an impetus to activate potentialities.
PSL 2022 on the theme of After/Lives will address this pandemic-heightened sense of living-on in a haunted world and on a damaged planet. After/Lives names the line that, like a glitch, both interrupts and relays a transitional spacetime without foreseeable transition: of endurance after exhaustion, life after death, survival after extinction, emergence after submergence. Whereas the normative events mentioned at the outset presume an anthropocentric capitalist calendar, a drive to control (re)productive times, spaces, and bodies, and the civilizational conceits of an inconvenienced white privilege, PSL 2022 calls for reparative readings of the present based in experimental reckonings with colonial histories of violence and their attendant late liberal economies of ruination and abandonment. The techniques and arts of survival, of recovering and worlding with what/who has been abandoned to/as ruin, will require seeking out decolonial and fugitive knowledges with which to craft speculative socio-political infrastructures that can render far-out futures habitable and inclusive. For every after/life, an after/world.
The summer lab will be organized into three clusters - Spectrality, Ruination and Survivance - and culminate in a final public experiment designed and created by the cohort: the construction of a Shrine. We will draw on diverse bibliographies, art works, archives of critical events, bodies of research, popular culture at the intersection of cultural theory, ethnography, arts, activism and experimental humanities, related to topics and fields such as speculative anthropology, death studies, studies of the anthropocene, radical black studies, decolonial and anti-colonial optics, afrofuturism, feminisms, social movement tactics, new media studies, critical photography, forensic architecture and platform studies.
We hope the lab will be a place for you to build on and cross pollinate your passions and politics through collaboration with others. We genuinely want this lab to be a healing time, a place to become unstuck, a framework for rethinking thinking and decolonizing knowledge, an impetus to activate potentialities.
