Cesare Pietroiusti | Economic Principles and Artistic Use of Paradox
December 7
This August, ACT lecturer Jesal Kapadia published a piece, What I am Reading Now…, digitally with the University of Dundee, Cooper Gallery’s A space in-between. Initiated in April 2020, A space in-between “will ask, pose and invite a world of questions.”
Begun in July 2020, “What I am Reading Now… is the online iteration of a printed column, of the same name in Cooper Gallery’s occasional periodical &labels.
“This ongoing online iteration of What I am Reading Now… is influenced by the global political movement Black Lives Matter and invites Black practitioners and practitioners of colour to share, with a preface, a selection of five readings that are shaping their current thinking, research and practice.”
Excerpt from Kapadia’s piece:
I’m reading this poem now, from I Saw Myself, Journeys with Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai by Shabnam Virmani and Vipul Rikhi, page 200, The Woman’s Voice:
Those who plunge, emerge
That’s how it’s always been
Submerge in the rampant river
And meet with Meher
Water is the element that remembers, holding the frequency of another timeline. What kind of care has been programmed here?
She said: Heat enters just like water. Transformation occurs – stones melt away as rhythm is in play. Healing occurs when care becomes love…by opening up the pathways. When we send signals of care, we’re saying that we’re not going to be harmful. We have to combine pleasure with healing; it’s magical! When you make decisions together, you are communicating, and that’s when the new comes in!
Thank you, Hardip, for the healing collective, for showing us how to read the signs.
I am reading about the transformation of everyday life, from Silvia Federici’s book, Re-enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, page 175.
Where does power reside? How do we rearrange our daily actions, so that we can transcend the traditional psychological viewpoints that individualize our experiences and separate the mental from the social, so that we can start to heal from the systemic harm?
She said: People have said to leave the oil in the ground. So the fight is to leave the oil in the ground, to make decisions collectively. Below the university, is the commons, the spaces of sanctuary.
Full piece can be found here.
Jesal Kapadia is an artist living between New York City and Bombay. Her work explores the potential forms of non-capitalist subjectivities. She has been thinking together with different communities of care that have come together to create spaces and situations through which to refuse, re-arrange, retrieve and re-enchant the capacity of art in creating new knowledges and new sensibilities for being together. Practices of commoning, weaving the intelligence of friendship and affection in the connective fabric that allows for removing conscious and unconscious dynamics of patriarchy from our bodies, have been central to these experiments.
