Future Perfect

Does it help if time-space continuum collapses into a future tense? 
What if we will have ended racial subjugation and violence?
What if we will have navigated the complexity of existence?
We will have experimented in living with complexity. We will have unsettled realities.
We will have reimagined how things and being can be otherwise.

 A day of encounterings and collective reflections with artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva & guests invites to speculative exercises on the im/possibility of global/racial un/justice. Three acts – an ENHANCED CONVERSATION with Berlin based activist groups, a black feminist POETHICAL READING, a FILM SCREENING & TALK –  unfold and explore political-aesthetical strategies in times of severe, of disruptive crisis.

UNPAYABLE DEBT  offers a black feminist “poethical” reading of the political architecture of the global present. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, in which an African American writer is transported from 1970s Los Angeles to the antebellum South to save the life of the child of a slave-owner who is also her ancestor, the concept of the unpayable debt – a debt someone owes but that is not hers to pay – relates post-Enlightenment versions of ethical and economic value to colonial and racial subjugation. Focusing on the philosophical basis of these renderings of value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes how coloniality and raciality operate in the juridical, ethical, and symbolic systems that facilitate the expropriation of labor and extraction of land essential for the accumulation of Capital.

SOOTH BREATH / Corpus Infinitumis a film by artist Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva dedicated to tenderness and repair. It is about reimagining knowledge and existence without the limits of European and Colonial constructions of the human. To speculate how to live otherwise as humans in the world,

The film crosses disciplines, calling on quantum mechanics to polyrhythms, from Tarkovsky to Hype Williams, from heat to Anaximander. It explores how social subjects, identities and categories are formed and recreated in society – in particular, how these processes have been designed as sovereign and independent from the body.

DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA  is a philosopher and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her academic writing and artistic practice address the ethico-political challenges of the global present. Among her publications are Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and A Dívida Impagavel (Unpayable Debt, 2019), texts for the Liverpool and São Paulo Biennials (2016), Biennale di Venezia (2017) and documenta 14. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as Centre Pompidue, White Chapel Gallery (London), Moma and Guggenheim (New York). Her artistic works include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Impliancy (2018) and Sooth Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020), all in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman. With Valentina Desideri she developed the relational practice of "Poethical Readings” as a device for augmenting sensemaking tools and unsettling realitities.