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PARSE is an international artistic research publishing platform and biennial conference based in The Artistic Faculty made up of HSM and HDK-Valand at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Its purpose is to bring interdisciplinary art practices and researchers from across disciplines into dialogue through shared enquiry.
Current
Editors – Jessica HemmingsJyoti Mistry
The visual language for a conference on love that recognises the continuum between enchantment and disaffection requires motifs that are neither immediately identifiable as the semiotics of commercialised love nor representational. The (re)constructions and deconstructions of love as a set of kinetic processes that simultaneously revitalise while having the capacity to destroy as a non-binary force is well-served by the drawings created by Jamie Hudson.
Previous
Editors – Mick WilsonJane Tynan
It all started with a conversation on torture techniques the British colonial administration employed in Kenya in the 1950s to suppress the Mau Mau uprising. We were struck by the extent of suffering that Kenyan people had to endure under British occupation, but even more astonished by the occupying forces’ efforts to hide evidence upon their retreat from this East African country. The British colonial venture in Kenya started in 1920, and subsequent restrictions on land ownership and local agricultural practices gave rise to a popular movement for land justice by members of the Kikayu tribe; without financial backing from outside Kenya, Mau Mau insurgents launched a violent campaign armed with homemade weapons. As Caroline Elkins argues, draconian measures to suppress Mau Mau transformed the colonial enterprise from “simple white supremacy, to one that was overtly eliminationist”.[1] Elkins found memoranda from late colonial Kenya filled with descriptions of local people as “vermin”, “animals” and “bestial”, designations that seemingly normalised the creation of vast detention camps.[2] Suspects were rounded up and held in these “screening” centres where they were subjected to electric shocks, whipping, burning, shooting and mutilation, purportedly to “gather intelligence”. While we exchanged thoughts on state brutality in Kenya in the 1950s, the 2021 PARSE conference agenda on the matter of violence emerged, and it seemed a useful framework within which to elaborate our basic interest in state violence as practice; how it is planned, trained for, augmented, strategised and systematically deployed through various bureaucratic, technocratic and socio-technical frameworks.
Forthcoming
Feminist Art: Practices of Co-Existences
- Issue 20
- — Winter 2024
PARSE journal issue 20 – Feminist Art – attends to artistic practices which enable reciprocal and intra-relational co-existences. Co-learning and physical, affective and material experiencing within diverse contexts and communities are explored with the intention to disrupt hegemonic art historical paradigms. Framed through a feminist ethics of care, the issue explores ways in which artistic practices have the potential to catalyse new ways of building knowledge(s) and the diverse methods and tools employed by art to mobilise alternative ways of learning while unlearning to learn anew. Foregrounding such strategies supports a plurality of perspectives in collaborative dialogue with other partners (human and other-than-human).
Arising from dialogues that first took place at the international symposium Lost & Found, comprising of three events between December 2023 and June 2024 in Lisbon, Warsaw and Riga, this PARSE journal foregrounds a scholarship of care — collaborative research that is, literally and metaphorically, in-touch — through diverse approaches to writing in conversation. The contributions engage with material and spatial relations to unearth forgotten rituals, languages and stories, encouraging us to leave the itineraries to which we have become accustomed and to distance ourselves from a priori discourses that have maintained and generated existing patterns of power and control. Engaging feminist art practice as making and thinking, the contributors to issue 20 explore potentials to foster responsible, response-able and empathetic co-existences towards others generating care for and about a more attentive and inclusive communal belonging.
Articles in ”Powers of Love”
The Mancoba Textile: Marriage, Friendship, Collaboration
The Mothership is Not a Metaphor
Writing the Borderlands of Desire and Distance:
Our Days of Gold:
In Reverie: Two Love Letters to Vinah
Queer Listening:
You, Me and Koda
Building Faculties
Performing The Deer’s Cry
I Am the Music!
In the House of Humanity Catastrophe and Ecstasy Hold Hands
Featured articles during October, 2024
This month my selection is based on contributors who have tackled amorphous substances. The selection below is far from an exhaustive review. Instead it represents a variety of contributors who task language with capturing liquid – one of the most slippery of our sensations.
Selection by Jessica Hemmings