EUTOPIAN IMAGES FOR OUR TIMES. THINKING THE COMMONS WITH IMAGES an expanded reading group facilitated by Philip Rizk as part of the School of Mutation online activities
This reading group of images and words is limited to 12 participants. Since space is limited please only sign up if you know you will be able to participate fully.
The group held in English will meet once a week over the course of 7 weeks starting at 7pm CET on January 25 2021. The viewing & reading materials (usually 1 film per week and ~ 50 pages of reading) will be made available at sign up and should be engaged with prior to each meeting. These will be collectively discussed in the 2 hour online sessions which won’t be recorded.
To join or if you have questions please email the facilitator by January 22nd 2021: rizkphilip AT gmail DOT com
“There is a song older than world here, it heals deeper than the colonizer’s blade could ever cut. And there, our voice. We were always healers. This is the first medicine.”
An indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto
In the early 1500s Thomas More wrote a novel entitled with a word he coined, “utopia.” 500 years later the play on words More had intended has been lost and only one of the two possible meanings of the term remains in common use: outopia, the impossible place. In the workshop “Eutopian images for our times,” we will resurrect the second possibility of the term: eutopia, a better place, with eyes set on the present – not a faraway future. In the seven session reading group we will engage with films and critical readings on themes of counter-histories, agricultural self-sufficiency and organic seed production, the commons, anti-neocolonialism, anti-imperialism and afro- futurist sounds for the now. A central pivot of the workshop is the exploration of what images can do and what kind of images allow us to theorize and think. If images have the potential to open up a critical space of imagining different worlds, can they arouse eutopic experiences for our times?