P P O E L O I P C L Y E

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This symposium is part of an ongoing research project which departs from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s notion of Policy in their book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013.) Policy People commissioned texts/interviews dealing practically or theoretically with North American policy in a biopolitical realm (food, health, education, housing, etc.) which were provided in a reader that generated further dialogue and questions amongst a European symposium of peers, including Egbert Alejandro Martina, Gabriela Quiroga, Hannah Black, Marina Vishmidt, Simone Zeefuik and other guests.

***The material produced during the symposium will be published in the near future.

After discussion there was dinner, drinks and music! Featuring a DJ set by Idi Amal Dada (of Africa Is Hot on Red Light Radio and The Side Room at Butcher’s Tears) and a vegan dinner of heartwarming vegetable curry with rice balls and spicy spring salad by Arda van Tiggelen.

Guests

Egbert Alejandro Martina is a cultural critic, activist, blogger who seeks to map the messy complexities of how Blackness structures our understanding of gender, ability, sexuality, and race. He describes himself as a diasporic Afrarealist. He is currently grappling with the implications of Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of the “afterlife of slavery,” and what Christina Sharpe calls living “in the wake.” He blogs at Processed Life about anti-Blackness in Dutch popular/political discourse, surveillance, and mobility. In his spare time, he is trying to perfect his earthbending techniques.

Hannah Black is an artist and writer. Her work is assembled from pop music and auto/biographical fragments and draws on feminist, communist and black radical thought. Her videos have recently been shown at W139 (Amsterdam), Embassy (Edinburgh), 155 Freeman/Triple Canopy (NYC), MoMAW (Warsaw), and Sala Luis Miro Quesada Garland (Lima), and her writing has been published by magazines including Dazed Digital, The New Inquiry, and Art in America. She was a studio participant on the Whitney ISP 2013-14 and graduated from the MFA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths in 2013. She is an editor at The New Inquiry and currently lives in Berlin.

Gabriela Quiroga Gilardoni is a social scientist and a Consultant for Rural Innovation and Farmers Organizations at ECT Foundation. For her Masters, she did research about an agricultural cooperative in eastern Uruguay, focusing on the organizational capacities to strengthen the social capital of livestock smallholders. She has experience in Uruguay for the national agricultural federation of cooperatives (CAF) and international experience working for worldwide federation of farmer’s organizations International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP). She advises organizations in farmer-led participatory policy generation with particular attention to young farmers’ leadership and empowerment as well as gender mainstreaming.

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer, editor and critic occupied mainly with questions around art, labour and value. She is the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, early 2016) and A for Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Textem, late 2014). She often works with artists and contributes to journals such as Mute, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Ephemera, Kaleidoscope, Parkett, and OPEN! as well as co-/edited collections and catalogues, most recently Anguish Language. She has authored chapters in The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics (Routledge, forthcoming) and The ECONOMY Reader (University of Liverpool Press, forthcoming). Her work on debt, social reproduction and artistic entrepreneurialism can be found on libcom.org and in the e-flux journal, and she has also lectured and given workshops on these topics in universities, art institutions and activist spaces.

Simone Zeefuik is an Amsterdam based writer and organizer whose work focuses on imagery, representation, anti-Black racism and the undocumented members of the Black communities in the Netherlands. She’s the founder of literary platform RE:Definition, initiator of digital archive #UndocumentedEU plus co-initiator of #UndocumentedNL and #DecolonizeTheMuseum.