Aesthetics | The Sojourner Project/South Africa

As Sylvia Wynter suggested nearly three decades ago, a radical rethinking of the category of aesthetics is a crucial, if woefully neglected, task for all of us who have been given to the refusal of modern catastrophe. This conversation between Denise Ferreira da Silva, Rizvana Bradley, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (of the Otolith Group), Jota Mombaça, and Gabi Ngcobo coincides with an experimental collaboration between Da Silva and Bradley, “Four Theses on Aesthetics,” published in the September issue of e-flux.
Building upon Bradley’s inquiries into the racially gendered labor concealed within the putatively autonomous totality of the work of art, and upon Da Silva’s critique of the modern principles of “separability, determinacy, and sequentiality,” Da Silva and Bradley’s essay deconstructs the framework of aesthetic judgement that has predominated since Kant. Endeavoring to rethink the relationship of the aesthetic to the organization of the modern world, “Four Theses on Aesthetics” sketches the contours of an alternative theory of Blackness, aesthetics, and the work of art.
This Sojourner Project session on aesthetics enters into the fray of these difficult problematics as a point of speculative departure, in the hopes of collectively contributing to the ongoing dissolution of the boundaries between philosophy, artistic experimentation, and abolitionist praxis.
00:00:00 Introduction | Tina Campt
00:09:18 Thesis on “Infinity” | Rizvana Bradley
00:13:23 Intervention | Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar
00:27:18 Thesis on “Re/De/composition” | Denise Ferreira da Silva
00:32:31 Intervention | Jota Mombaça
00:45:41 Thesis on “Seriality” | Rizvana Bradley
00:49:57 Intervention | Gabi Ngcobo
00:57:03 Thesis on “Generatitivity” | Denise Ferreira da Silva
01:01:24 Why rethink aesthetics now? | Q&A
01:20:41 Black poethics and the establishment | Q&A
01:34:58 Theory, form, and the corpus infinitum| Q&A
01:53:22 Final Remarks
Recorded on October 8, 2021. Hosted by the Cogut Institute’s Black Visualities Initiative under the leadership of Tina Campt, and presented collaboratively with the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg and Art for Humanity at Durban University of Technology, with the support of the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM).