Gathering of ghosts

We live in a haunted world. Our present is imbued with ghosts speaking from both past and future. They are a paradox, an absence, human and other-than-human, that is nevertheless eerily present and influential. They might point out that something is missing, something is wrong. Ghosts show us that time is not linear, but entangled, thick and layered.

Ghosts open up a potential for other stories of the now, the past and the future. They might provoke in us the desire and tools for living otherwise. Recognizing ourselves as haunted and haunting, makes our understanding of the present, and ourselves in it, permeable. By inhabiting this ghostliness we may recognize a different proximity to each other and what surrounds us.

Eight artists will gather spectrally, together with a ghostly partner, in order to explore how their artistic processes might make space for ghosts and work with or for them.

Gathered by: Ingrid Vranken / FoAM Zenne

With: Mihaela Brebenel, Nahuel Cano, Mayfield Brooks, Rodrigo Batista, Mathieu Charles, Gosie Vervloessem, Rasa Alksnyte and the ghosts of past selves, Weegbree, a nature reserve, ancestors, whales, gore capitalism, breath and socialism, amongst many others.

Gathering of ghosts was a 2 week residency at WP Zimmer during pandemic times. Instead of meeting physically, we had an online exchange every evening. Discussions spanning from presentations of our work to shared readings. Followed by a 3 week residency with support from Kaaitheater in Brussels, during which we produced an audio-lecture for the symposium 'On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors', curated by David Weber-Krebs and Jeroen Peeters.

Haunted Reading List: (in no particular order)

  • Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters
  • Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Half Way
  • Liliana Ancalao, When I die I should cross the river
  • Liliana Ancalao, Memory of the Sacred Lands
  • Eugene Thacker, In the dust of this planet
  • Joanne Chassot, Ghosts of the African diaspora
  • Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx
  • Natalia Meeker & Antonia Szabari, Radical Botany, plants and speculative fiction
  • Anna Tsing e.a., The Arts of Living on a Damaged planet
  • Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme
  • Frank B. Wilderson, III, Afropessimism
  • Sylvia Wynter, On being human as a practice
  • Saidiya Hartman, Venus in two acts
  • Saidiya Hartman, Wayward lives
  • Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Potential History
  • Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned
  • Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M, Archive after the end of the world
  • Silvia Schwarzböck, Los espantos Estética y postdictadura
  • Adrian Tchaykovsky, Children of Time
  • Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy
  • Maria Gimbutas, The Living Godesses
  • Marianne Krogh, Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Anthropocene Views, Thoughts, Considerations, Insights, Images, Notes & Remarks, ED.
  • Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
  • Ayesha Hameed, Black Atlantis
  • Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution
  • Philip K. Dick, Time out of joint
  • Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
  • Jane Bennett, Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild
  • Encyclopédie de la divination
  • Mark Fisher, The weird and the eerie
  • Audre Lorde, Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power
  • Nicole Seymour, Bad environmentalism
  • Toni Morisson, beloved
  • Rita Segato, Las Estructuras Elementales de la Violencia
  • Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  • Hilda Hilst, Porn Chic
  • Andrea Long Chu, Females
  • Valerie Solanas, Scum Manifesto
  • Paul Preciado, Testojunkie
  • Giordano Nanni, The colonisation of time
  • Octavia Butler, Kindred
  • Deepika Bahri, Postcolonial biology
  • N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth Trilogy

checking out list:

  • gatheringghosts.txt
  • Last modified: 2021-02-25 15:29
  • by ingrid