Policy People
Saturday 28 March, 3 – 10 pm
About
Policy People is a collaborative research project initiated at the Jan van Eyck Academie by writer E. C. Feiss and designer Karisa Senavitis in 2014. Policy People deals with the axis of prevention and participation. The effort is to undo policy and to introduce spaces for contestation within policy processes. Policy People departs from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s discussion of ‘policy’ in their book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013.) The project began with commissioned texts and interviews by Ayesha Hameed, Jonathan Michel Metzl, Interboro, Claire Pentecost and Gillian Harkins + Erica Meiners. Each deals practically or theoretically with policy in a biopolitical realm: food, health, border, education, and housing.
The commissioned texts will be activated in a symposium, with contributions by: Egbert Alejandro Martina, Hannah Black, Marina Vishmidt and other guests. The material produced prior to and the discussion during the symposium will come together in a future publication.
Guests:
Hanna Black
Hannah Black is an artist and writer. Her work is assembled from pop music and auto/biographical fragments and draws on feminist, communist and black radical thought. Her videos have recently been shown at W139 (Amsterdam), Embassy (Edinburgh), 155 Freeman/Triple Canopy (NYC), MoMAW (Warsaw), and Sala Luis Miro Quesada Garland (Lima), and her writing has been published by magazines including Dazed Digital, The New Inquiry, and Art in America. She was a studio participant on the Whitney ISP 2013-14 and graduated from the MFA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths in 2013. She is an editor at The New Inquiry and currently lives in Berlin.
Egbert Alejandro Martina
Egbert Alejandro Martina is a cultural critic, activist, blogger who seeks to map the messy complexities of how Blackness structures our understanding of gender, ability, sexuality, and race. He describes himself as a diasporic Afrarealist. He is currently grappling with the implications of Saidiya Hartman's theorization of the "afterlife of slavery," and what Christina Sharpe calls living "in the wake." He blogs at Processed Life about anti-Blackness in Dutch popular/political discourse, surveillance, and mobility. In his spare time, he is trying to perfect his earthbending techniques.
Gabriela Quiroga Gilardoni
Gabriela Quiroga Gilardoni is a social scientist and a Consultant for Rural Innovation and Farmers Organizations at ECT Foundation. For her Masters, she did research about an agricultural cooperative in eastern Uruguay, focusing on the organizational capacities to strengthen the social capital of livestock smallholders. She has experience in Uruguay for the national agricultural federation of cooperatives (CAF) and international experience working for worldwide federation of farmer’s organizations International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP). She advises organizations in farmer-led participatory policy generation with particular attention to young farmers’ leadership and empowerment as well as gender mainstreaming.
Marina Vishmidt
Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer, editor and critic occupied mainly with questions around art, labour and value. She is the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, early 2016) and A for Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Textem, late 2014). She often works with artists and contributes to journals such as Mute, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Ephemera, Kaleidoscope, Parkett, andOPEN! as well as co-/edited collections and catalogues, most recently Anguish Language. She has authored chapters in The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics (Routledge, forthcoming) and The ECONOMY Reader (University of Liverpool Press, forthcoming). Her work on debt, social reproduction and artistic entrepreneurialism can be found on libcom.org and in the e-flux journal, and she has also lectured and given workshops on these topics in universities, art institutions and activist spaces.
Simone Zeefuik
Simone Zeefuik is an Amsterdam based writer and organizer whose work focuses on imagery, representation, anti-Black racism and the undocumented communities in the Netherlands. She’s the founder of literary platform RE:Definition, co-founder of UndocumentedNL, co-initiator of #DecolonizeTheMuseum and the would-be chairman of the should-be board of people who have no intention to read the comment section.
Moderators
E. C. Feiss
E. C. Feiss is a writer. Her work has appeared in After all, Open!, Texte zur Kunst, and Radical Philosophy, among others. Recent and current projects include: participation in Re-Materializing Feminism, ICA London and The Politics of Attachment, ASCA (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis). She is a tutor in Critical Studies and the School of Missing Studies, both at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.
Karisa Senavitis
Karisa Senavitis is a practicing designer/researcher with her partner Kevin O'Neill. The focus of their research is within a realm they refer to as 'way-out-finding': generating and transmitting knowledges that are contained, wayward or lost. Her current projects include: orchestrating a philosophy of public health residency at Jan van Eyck Academie called Foreign Bodies, producing a word core 7-inch series featuring women writers, and developing an ongoing play-list and text about some sounds of subjectivity called "the high risk group."
Important note:
There is a limited number of seats available for the symposium, so we recommend you to come early.
Entrance:
Pay-what-you-will
Reader
Download the preliminary reader here.
policypeople_reader.pdf (545 KB)