Gesture and Thought Working Group
Led by: Angel Gutierrez (PhD student, Rhetoric)
The Gesture and Thought Working Group’s primary focus is to be a research and performance collective of students, artists, and scholars, irrespective of discipline, who critically study and engage with notions of gesture, poiesis, creation, structure, form, sign, symbol and/or language.
Gesture (i.e., the representation indexed by the concept-metaphor of ‘gesture’) is not a neutral site indicating the successful force of language or the body to index signs nor is it simply an auxiliary act for language. To think gesture is to consider the interpenetration of matter and thought, and the task of this collective is to study how the processes of colonization, of conquest, of slavery, of capitalist modernity, and racialization have structured and continue to structure cognition and movement.
The group will approach different notions of gesture and thought at play, drawing on selections from Sylvia Wynter, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the EZLN, Selamawit Terrefe, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Hortense Spillers, M. NourbeSe Philip, Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Nina Simone, Joy James, Arca, Tracie Morris, Sylvia Rivera, Delcy Morelos, Mire Lee, Regina Jose Galindo, Carlos Martiel, Theresa Hyak Kyung Cha, and Ana Mendietta.
Working with 6 key themes (Movement, Sound and Speech, Sacrifice, Structure, Idea and Myth, & Production and Consumption), the Gesture and Thought Working Group aims to build a space where participants collectively organize thought and action, using variegated forms of practice, towards critical thinking. The working group will be structured around:
• Open Studio Space: Will run consistently throughout academic year. Critique of participants' works will be collectively organized within the space. (Note: There are facility limitations and codes to take mind of. This will be discussed in group.)
• Movement-Performance Workshops: to occur 3 times a semester. Each workshop will include movement-performance exercises, in-group discussion over selections, and screenings.
We ask that workshop participants be able to attend as many movement-performance workshops. No previous knowledge or experience is required. Participation is limited.
DAY/TIME: Every other Tuesday from 2-5pm
WHO: Free and open to all – anyone can be a student.
INTEREST FORM: here
QUESTIONS? CONTACT: angel111@berkeley.edu
The Sentence Working Group
led by Pia Sazani (PhD student, Rhetoric)
The Sentence Working Group is a space for students to think through the relationship between language and understanding through the practice of writing: what unfamiliar experiences of understanding and knowledge are possible through writing, and, ultimately, what strategies/methods encourage such experiences?
The Sentence Group will be guided by the interests of those who attend the group, but we might start provisionally with questions like:
- How does one thought lead to the next?
- What to do with impulses toward completion, resolution, and coherence?
- How might we conceive of rigor in writing divested from knowing, understanding?
- Are we able, through the writing of a sentence, able, as Renee Gladman contends, able to turn ourselves “toward a knowing”—“not toward a countable knowledge” but toward a “better vantage point for viewing the unknown”?
The plan is to close read writers that develop unintuitive relationships to understanding, reading for craft, structure, and strategy. This may include poetry, experimental nonfiction, and probably a lot of Fred Moten. These readings will be supplemented with writing exercises intended to open up new routes for, in, and through thinking. Ideally, we’ll find space for workshopping each others’ writing.
This group has in mind graduate students—or, rather, anyone whose mind feels a bit overly-bound-up in the academic register. It takes as an assumption that the conventions of writing train our habits of thought. It begins its inquiry at the level of the sentence.
(image: Mirtha Dermisache, from Selected Writings, 2018)
DAY/TIME: tentatively every other Monday at 3:30-5:30pm
WHO: Students, faculty, community
INTEREST FORM: here
QUESTIONS? CONTACT: psazani@berkeley.edu
Elemental Activism: Ritual, Sound, and Collective Transformation Working Group
Led by: AshEL Seasunz Eldridge (PhD Student, Performance Studies)
The Elemental Activism Working Group is a study-and-practice collective for artists, scholars, healers, organizers, musicians, and practitioners interested in ritual, music medicine, spirituality, and embodied approaches to social transformation. The group asks how practices commonly described as ceremonial, spiritual, healing, or contemplative might also function as forms of research, critical inquiry, and collective knowledge-making. Emerging from my developing framework of Elemental Activism, we will explore what I call performed interdependence: the proposition that interdependence is not simply an idea or political aspiration, but something continually enacted through bodies, attention, sound, relationship, ecology, and collective practice. A central question will be the relationship between inner transformation and outer social conditions: How might changing the ways we listen, perceive, regulate, relate, and imagine alter the kinds of social worlds we are capable of making together?
A recurring practice laboratory within the group will draw from Body as Cosmos, an evolving workshop methodology in which the body becomes a site for investigating relationships among inner experience, collective life, and the more-than-human world. Through deep listening, meditation, breath, improvisation, acoustic sound, chanting, movement, relational exercises, ritual, and collective reflection, participants will move between experiencing a practice and critically studying what that practice produces. We will explore what we come to understand differently when ideas are not only discussed, but practiced through the body, through sound, through ritual, and in relationship with one another.
Sonic and practice-based interlocutors might include Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, hip-hop, kirtan, icaros, medicine music, prayer, chanting, and traditions of collective improvisation in which sound functions not simply as an aesthetic object but as a way of thinking, relating, and knowing. The group would meet once a month, with each gathering organized around a particular question and practice, and with the possibility that the inquiry eventually generates a public ritual-performance, sound installation, listening session, symposium, or other collective form that we cannot currently foresee.
DAY/TIME: Once a month, TBD
WHO: UC Berkeley graduate students and faculty, artists, practitioners, organizers, and members of the wider Bay Area community interested in the intersection of critical inquiry, creative practice, spirituality, ritual, and collective transformation.
QUESTIONS? CONTACT: asheleldridge@berkeley.edu
D23 Gallery Working Group
Led by: Yiming Clara Li (Undergraduate Student)
D23 Gallery is a working group and provisional gallery space that convenes faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates across disciplines to explore how artistic forms of presentation may give rise to new modalities, contexts, and socialities for their academic work. Focusing on projects already underway, the group draws from the practical methodologies of artists to imagine alternate forms for ideas to surface, opening onto new outlooks and publics while taking a generative detour that helps push ongoing work toward the intended end. These forms are anchored by presentation in a public exhibition that momentarily transforms the Arts Research Center (HFA D23) into a gallery, while extending into various programming that explores ideas in performance based methods. Each exhibition will host an opening event which occasions as a social gathering for the wider community. The project will also seek to produce yearly catalogues in the form of Artist’s Books that give another life to the group’s work.
Inspired by the way artists often allow material to lead to the emergence of a thought, we use the simple method of gathering––differnet minds, dispositions, and pre-existing projects––to occasion the emergence of new ideas. Curatorial concepts thus succeed a period of convening, and exhibitions emerge out of this constellatory practice. The working group will be structured in seasonal cycles where a curatorial fellow, a lead artist, and an evolving cohort of participants meet weekly. Exhibitions will take place monthly or once every two months. This working group grows out of Apartment 19, an independent, artist-run project space that comes from the same impulse to create new encounters through the context of art.
(Image: Installation view of The Chair at Apartment 19. Photo: Yiming Clara)
DAY/TIME: TBD
WHO: UC Berkeley faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates across disciplines
QUESTIONS? CONTACT: clara.li@berkeley.edu
Black Sound and Music Working Group
Led by: Sofia Smith (visiting PhD student, Brown University)
This working group is for artists, practitioners, researchers, and those in between with a stake in Afro-diasporic, creative, and/or avant-garde music practices. The sessions will be designed in collaboration with participants, structured around a mix of listening sessions, discussions of shared readings, and playing music together. Key areas of exploration include (but are not limited to) black music’s entanglement with modernity and the human, performativity and enfleshment, and questions of form. Woven throughout the sessions, the division between theory and practice will remain an active site of inquiry. Rather than exclusively working with material that is about music and sound, the group will engage a wide array of sources to consider sound as music as a method for thinking. Thinkers we might engage with include Amiri Baraka, Tina Campt, Alice Coltrane, Malik Gaines, Saidiya Hartman, Kodwo Eshun, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, George Lewis, Fred Moten, Sun Ra, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nina Simone, Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter, Calvin Warren, Kandice Chuh, Amber Musser, and others. We will meet once a month, beginning in October.
(image: Conspiracy, 1975, album cover, Earthforms Records)
DAY/TIME: Once a month starting in October with the possibility of a culminating performance/symposium.
WHO: Faculty and grad students (in or outside of Berkeley), community members, interested undergrads can reach out for consideration on a case-by-case basis, those without musical experience are also welcome to reach out to see if the group would be a good fit
INTEREST FORM: here
QUESTIONS? CONTACT:sofiasmith@berkeley.edu
Open Group
Led by: The Arts Research Center
An open database of people who are interested in the proposition of studying Open Rehearsal processes. This group will include students, faculty, community, local, national, and international scholar-artists interested in this work, along with institutions. People can dip in and out across the year. There is no attendance obligation, no expectation that anyone produce anything for the group. The invitation is repeatable rather than binding. This group will be invited to the Open Rehearsal online events.
DAY/TIME: Varies. Next Open Rehearsal is Thurs Nov 12 from 4-5:30pm PST
WHO: Students, faculty, community, local, national, and international scholar-artists and audience participants.
INTEREST FORM: here
QUESTIONS? CONTACT: lilygee@berkeley.edu
Making Theory
This working group grows out of Making Theory, an initiative that takes seriously the idea that making is itself a form of theoretical inquiry. It convenes artist-scholars from across the University of California who treat making as a mode of thinking, whose work happens in the practice rather than in commentary about it, and among them are artists whose practice is itself propositional. What draws them together is a shared desire to work alongside others looking to develop the vocabulary and frameworks of support for theoretically engaged practice-based research.
For further information contact okiji@berkeley.edu.
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