CHRISTOF MIGONE

Shut Up (Preambles and Postfaces)

In 2008 I attended the Banff International Curatorial Institute Symposium. Towards the end of the conference, Matthew Higgs used his presentation time to pass around the microphone to all the participants asking them to respond to the prompt of what part of the conference had impacted them most thus far. Attendees numbered close to a hundred, I was in the last row. So by the time the mic reached me a lot had been said, I felt the need to skip my turn without retreating altogether, to take the moment of speaking as a moment of listening, to unsay somehow. So I said “What has impacted most so far is everything that has been said up until now and all that will be said once I pass this mic.” This presentation will be an instructional on how to shut up productively. A consideration of the imperative to listen. A quieting aloud. A sonics of silence. An artist talk by a talk artist that would prefer not to. A reflection on erasure and effacement, negation and mutism. A reflection on how these states of willed nullification, and the bemusement they engender, might serve as some of the pre- and post- conditions of possibility for change, however minueted.

LISA ROBERTSON

The Baudelaire Fractal

This is an account of how quite suddenly one morning upon waking I came into the knowledge that I had written the complete works of Baudelaire. It was certain that it was I who had written them: the lyric poems, prose poems, essays, art writings. . . even the letters and ephemera. And yet I was not Baudelaire; I remained myself. This ectoplasmic recognition took place in a hotel room in the Spring of 2017. A special consideration of the Salons shall inform the account. They called me to disorder.

MARK CLINTBERG

Between us

This presentation provides a focused contextualization of key artworks and pieces of critical writing from Clintberg’s practice that employ writing and inscription as forms of hailing or interpellation. In many cases, writing here becomes a publicly distributed method for evoking interpersonal relationship, and is materialized through neon signage, fibre, or printed matter. The models of interpellation discussed here are influenced by the writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, who each explore how naming and hailing are methods of identity formation. The use of spatial language and prepositions in his work will also be discussed in connection to Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. Particular attention will be given to the role of affect in critical writing and art practice.