Think from Black
Joburg convening: 26, 27, 28 January 2023
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RGC is hosting a unique three-day convening in Johannesburg from the 26th-28th January, in collaboration with the Practicing Refusal Collective (PRC) and co-sponsored by the Princeton Collaboratorium and the Columbia University Institute for Research on Women and Gender Studies. A local cohort of seventeen artists, thinkers, writers, curators and practitioners will join visiting PRC members for a series of intimate discussions, listening sessions, shared meals and creative activations.
The January convening extends the transnational work initiated by the PRC through the Sojourner Project and forms part of a new collaborative project the collective is initiating. Titled, Think from Black: A Lexicon, the project is imagined as a collective effort to create a more expansive conceptual vocabulary that takes Black life (in all of its diversity and multiplicity) as its point of departure. Revisiting the original concepts and keywords explored in the Sojourner Project sessions, the group will explore a selection of new terms - developing provisional definitions for these when 'thought from black'. The planned convening will be an opportunity to share and discuss these terms, and to explore how they register and travel in different contexts. Lexicon terms will be exchanged, discussed, performed and felt in response to the following prompt offered by members of the PRC:
If we consider a lexicon neither an authoritative nor putatively objective collection of definitions, but instead a set of terms and practices that animate black life – we invite you to contribute your definition of a term that “thinks from Black”. What are the most meaningful terms that allow you to articulate the multiple/intricate textures of Blackness? What terms allow you to think and account for Black life in its irreducible im/possibility?
Two days of closed (by-invitation) workshops will be hosted by the Library of things we forgot to remember (26th) and LAPA (27th). All are welcome on the 28th to join a public programme of sonic, performative and poetic responses at the Johannesburg Art Gallery which will open the dialogue to a broader community.
Click here to view participant bios | Click here for the public programme at JAG