COMMONPLACES AND ENTANGLEMENTS are key concepts of Martinican philosopher, writer, and poet Édouard Glissant, whose book, Poetique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation), remains a singularly important work in approaching the challenges of a world that is at one and the same time interrelated across distances, but uneven in its geopolitics of knowledge.
Dr. Dalida María Benfield, (CAD+SR Research and Programs Director) and Christopher A Bratton (CAD+SR Executive Director) situate their work at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR) within a schema of both place and movement, their commonplaces and entanglements. How can learning be addressed in the context of resurgent nationalisms, forced migration, and ubiquitous but uneven digitalization? How might forms of learning de-emphasize the "global north", be de-institutionalized, and in effect be unlearned, to produce new understanding of the techno-social world to better act upon it? Benfield and Bratton will discuss some of their most recent experiments in creating workshops and residencies, laboratories for radical hospitality and conviviality, and the emergent senses of commonplaces and entanglements that these produce.
Dalida María Benfield, Ph.D. (Panamá/US) is the cofounder and Research and Program Director of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR), a non-profit, international research and educational platform that grants fellowships to artists, activists, and researchers, and organises residencies and workshops. Her research and artistic practice engage decoloniality and women of colour and transnational feminisms, as these bodies of thought and action intersect with aesthetics, media, networks, and pedagogies. In tandem, she is a longtime organiser of autonomous pedagogical experiments in cultural production. Her films, videos, performances, installations, and workshops are regularly presented internationally, and her writing appears in numerous online and print publications. She is also the co-founder of the Institute of (im)Possible Subjects, a transnational feminist collective who curated a year-long series of public interventions, including exhibitions, online events, performances, and workshops, "Migratory Times," (2016-2017) in Colombia, Denmark, the Phillipines, Spain, S. Korea, and the US, with an ongoing online publication series. Her Ph.D. is from the University of California-Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Christopher Bratton is an artist, educator, and co-founder of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR), based in Boston, Massachusetts, US, with national and international programs. CAD+SR is founded on the principle that speculative creative work is an essential foundation for building sustainable, interdependent, and planetary cultures. The resulting projects are experiments in form that address issues of wide significance, linked to specific social and political contexts. Bratton is a former Deputy Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, President of the San Francisco Art Institute, and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His video and installation work, addressing questions of global media cultures, have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and international film festivals, including Seoul, Berlin and Havana. He is a Professor and Director of the Foundation and General Studies Program in the School of Arts, Design, and Architecture at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.
More information about CAD+SR can be found at: centerartsdesign.org.
Image: "Vislumbres Potencialmente Libertadores no Sistema da 33a Bienal de São Paulo" (Potential Liberatory Visions of the 33rd Sao Paulo Biennial System), a workshop by Dalida María Benfield, Christopher Bratton, Bernardo Fontes, Bruno Moreschi, and Gabriel Pereira, at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, November 2018. The workshop was co-sponsored by CAD+SR and the Itau Cultural Center as part of Outra 33 Bienal (Another 33rd Biennial) a work by CAD+SR Senior Research Fellow Bruno Moreschi, commissioned by the 33rd São Paulo Biennial.
