Tress_passing

15.00–17.00: Ben Spatz, decolonial jewishness and the black planetary* – plenary session
17.00–18.30: Meal
18.30–20.00: Adi Liraz, My Fluid Body on an Uneven Political Ground – lecture performance

*The lower-case spelling of identity terms is put up for discussion in the lectures.

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Ben Spatz
decolonial jewishness and the black planetary

The plenary session is an experimental event combining multiple modes of gathering: lecture, performance, workshop, rest, video, and study. Interdisciplinary nonbinary performer and critical theorist Ben Spatz develops this form of post-laboratory theatre in unpayable debt to the ancestors and the earth. The score will be fixed as a braid of intersecting identities and forms of knowledge. A central question interrogates the relationship between the vital but rapidly diminishing spark of diasporic jewish decoloniality and the warm embrace of a groundless and perhaps not yet imaginable planetary blackness. A central tactic involves the naming of whiteness and coloniality to reframe capitalism and climate crisis.

* plenary from plenitude, fullness, wholeness
* rest after Black Power Naps, Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa
* study after Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
* study after Franz Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus
* long table after Lois Weaver
* ancestors after Houria Boutleldja and CLR James
* intersections after Tiffany Lethabo King
* decolonial judaism after Santiago Slabodsky
* groundless after Marquis Bey
* planetary from planeta, wanderer

See also: Ben Spatz, Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research (Northwestern University Press, 2024). @cryptojudaica

Adi Liraz
My Fluid Body on an Uneven Political Ground

In this interactive lecture performance, interdisciplinary artist Adi Liraz traces a process of embodying memory. Our bodies carry our personal and political histories; they reinscribe our internal and external worlds. Our actions in any social space are, to some extent, guided and shaped by these scripts, sometimes so much that we reproduce our ancestral past without being aware of it. But can we make different choices? Using spoken text, fabric, embroidery, action, and liquid substances, Liraz creates an organic space out of lived experiences, opening channels of collective sharing as a potential ground for temporary solidarity.