✦ The Sojourner Project

Whether the ghetto or the black body, whether a place, person, text or experience, enclosures often manifest in their singularity. And yet enclosures must be also reckoned with and recognized as systemic, interconnected in order for them to be affectively debilitating and effectively deadly. This workshop “Enclosures: Blackness & Transmutation'' will study and engage practices that transmutate the material, spatial, temporal or psychic forms of enclosure. The first part of this two part workshop closely reads texts such as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! along with other artistic works that breach, atomize, ruin, and degrade the bounded logics of enclosures toward liberation. The workshop’s second part will draw upon concepts of futurity and imagination as modalities that transmutate enclosures into other times/spaces/things, into liberation. Participants will share their transformation of a selected image, object, map, recording, video, or sound to explore imminent and alchemical possibilities.

The Sojourner Project South Africa is a transnational dialogue initiated by The Practicing Refusal Collective, in collaboration with partners in South Africa. Our goal in convening these small group workshops is to encourage meaningful exchange and to collectively explore how notions of Black precarity, fungibility and futurity travel and register differently in multiple localities. We are thus encouraging individuals and communities of Southern Africa to register for these focused sessions, and ask that you provide a brief statement of interest or motivation for your inclusion.

Materials