Workshop
Mon 17 Apr 2023

Reading Group: Cristina Rivera Garza’s “The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation”

Online

Participants

Femke SneltingEva Weinmayr

Reading Group: Cristina Rivera Garza’s “The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation”

Disappropriation has involved, and still involves, the critical renunciation of what capital-L Literature does and has always done: appropriating others’ voices and experiences for its own benefit and its own hierarchies of influence. Disappropriation has involved, and still involves, exposing the mechanisms that permit an unequal exchange of labor: the labor that uses the language of collective experience for the author’s individual gain. The comprehensive goal of disappropriation was, and is, to return all writing to its plural origin. (p.4)

We are curious how Garza’s description of disappropriative practices could help us formulate a politics of re-use. Even if for Garza, disappropriation is based in writerly practice, what would disappropriation mean for other types of creative practice?

Reading instruction

We will read “Introduction” (pages 3-7) and chapter “Disappropriation-Writing with and for the Dead: A poetics of community”, (pages 52-56)

Literature List

Garza, Cristina Rivera (2020). The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press

Contributors

Femke Snelting

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, feminisms, and Free Software. In various constellations, she works on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud.

With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard, she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice and para-academic gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists that creates spaces for articulating what computational infrastructures in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making.

With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication results from a collective disobedient research project which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies.

In the research project Ecologies of Dissemination she develops, together with Eva Weinmayr, feminist and decolonial approaches to Open Access.

Until 2021, she was responsible for artistic direction of Constant, an association for art and media based in Brussels. Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts.

Femke regurlarly teaches at New Performative Practices (Stockholm University of the Arts) and supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht). She also contributes to Nubo, a cooperative which provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services.

Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr’s collaborative practice is grounded in contemporary art, radical education and institutional analysis. In 2020 she published her doctoral thesis, titled Noun to Verb, on a MediaWiki. This research is concerned with the micropolitics of publishing from an intersectional, feminist perspective. (HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, SE)

As interims chair of faculty Art and Education at Munich Art Academy (2022-23) she co-initiated together with students kritilab, an open source platform for discrimination-critical teaching in the arts. From 2019 to 22 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” inspired by US activist, teacher and theorist bell hooks (with erg, Brussels, BE).

As part of Ecologies of Dissemination (HDK-Valand, 2023-24) she is currently Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK). Ecologies of Dissemination, a collaboration with artist Femke Snelting, seeks strategies for dissemination and a politics of re-use that acknowledge the tensions between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of Open Access. More specificly, they explore in which way the current drive drive to universal access policies might overlook relational aspects.

Recent artistic research-based projects include “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021-22, with Lucie Kolb), “Library of Inclusions and Omissions” (2016-20), “The Piracy Project” (2010-15, with Andrea Francke), AND Publising (2010-ongoing, with Rosalie Schweiker).