OPEN ASSEMBLY

When one poses a thought out loud, another will answer. This answer will not be a final solution, because another will come along and further interrogate. What did you mean by this? Could this be evaluated through the _____ method? Louder, bolder answers will branch off from this challenge and will be claimed: this is the answer. Refutes will quickly follow. We continue because we must. It’s what we know.

Kant’s image appears behind Denise Ferreira da Silva as she smiles at the table full of us students. On January 17th, 18th, and 20th, 2024, we were participants in her thought experiments. da Silva situates the moment: there is immense upheaval and uncertainty. There is/has been profound violence inflicted upon the Palestinian people. There is/was a global pandemic of COVID-19. There is/has been unprecedented gun violence against Black people. We are/have been living in an ongoing climate catastrophe. There is, firmly in the present, an unlivable quality about this moment. 

What do we do? is the inquiry-based salve we treat our wounds with. Solutions always solve the problem, don’t they? But, what if we don’t fully understand the problem? Why does the wound still hurt so badly?

The wound we’re trying to treat is the “do”, here. da Silva asks us to focus on the “what.” To move beyond the what, to move beyond what the critique has been so far. Sure, time has been spent exposing fundamental operations of these grave issues, but they keep coming back. da Silva herself says the dialectic of critiques doesn’t kill the threats that still exist. Fascism doesn’t die. Why does it keep coming back? 

Is there a return policy on this salve?

da Silva turns to subjectivity; she says enough of that, something else. Have an engagement at the level of sensibility. We laugh, the room lightens, we’re thinking with her. No longer passive subjects, but engaged participants in this sense.

Today, we are to think of how Blackness helps in the limitations of critique: it contains identity, unity, formality, efficacy – all these are elements of critique. To critique is to ask, and she is asking us to operate in this modality not as a concept but outside of such concepts of criticism. Kant is no longer on the slide behind her. We’re outside of Kant, now.

Instead, da Silva projects Zinzi Minott’s WKOSWIB? (What Kind Of Slave Would I Be?) on the screen. We are experimenting outside of subjectivity in the political sense, as we should be, with not just the inquiring existential “I” but the Black “I” – specifically, Minott’s “I”. The artist’s inquiry is “an act of temporal trickery. It is an act of memory. It is a sign of temporal respect,” where Minott engages with the past in the present to look towards the future. Minott defies the timeline with one question. The work is emblematic of da Silva’s modeling of inquiry – these are questions outside of the limitations. The question that Minott asks understands identity, unity, formality, and efficacy, and says, enough of that, something else.

Photography by Rohan Ayinde, courtesy of https://zinziminott.com/works/wkoswib/

da Silva calls back to her original task, this is not something one person can do, but I’m trying. We smile with her. 

The title of the first day’s seminar is “After All It’s Said.” A phrase that feels half-cooked, awaiting a response, teasing possibilities. When is after? What is said? Who is saying it? What happens after? da Silva addresses this confusion with us, why after all it’s said? and suggests but does not commit to an answer: something that encompasses a multitude such as Blackness, violence, temporality, linearity, which are all part of one larger experiment ahead: no questions, but rehearse the way to ask the question. We continue to rehearse the questions, understanding that this is where we will remain if we are to think of healing wounds. No answers yet.

da Silva moves on and shows us another artist operating in (out?) of this modality: Jota Mombaça, a Brazilian artist and collaborator of da Silva’s. Mombaça is behind her up on the screen now in their work Soterramento; they walk towards a pile of concrete and dirt surrounded by a small crowd. She assembles a shovel and begins to dig. We then cut to her body, half naked, lying on the ground next to the pile. They are actively being buried and communicating with those people that are burying her. A few moments pass, and a speaker begins to read from a prepared speech: “150 families were forcibly evicted from their homes by the state of Rio de Janeiro.” Mombaça’s head and shoulders are uncovered; she slowly rises from the detritus. Everyone claps. Here, da Silva leads us to identify the theme of refusal. What is being refused? A refusal of the question, of what was done. The what, we still must think about, after all it’s said.