Re-possession

Zapatista Army of National Liberation ↩

Scott, Julius S., 2018. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution ↩

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.
William Wordsworth, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” [1802] ↩

Co-Liberation: the RCA School of Architecture International Lecture Series 2020-21 Convened by Thandi Loewenson & Dubravka Sekulić with Adrian Lahoud, David Burns and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng ‘As long as we are resisting we are free’ echoes the lingering battle-cry of the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin. For Amin, revolution was a process, a non-linear struggle forged in the long-now. This is revolution crafted in acts of resistance, in everyday opposition to an oppressive, profit-over-people logic which would seek to foreclose access, movement and imagination. This is revolution enacted through acts of freedom, through dangerous dreaming, alternative occupations and the construction of infinite, previously unthinkable possibilities in the face of enclosure. This is revolution as a home, a place of warmth, care, mutual aid, and solidarity across globally dispersed sites of interconnected struggle. This is a revolution that considers the days after the revolution as an integral part. It does not forget to think about those who will, after the revolution, as artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles reminds us, 'pick up the garbage on Monday morning'. This year’s series of lectures – under the theme Co-Liberation – draws these acts of resistance and freedom close and into dialogue, understanding that they operate both in time and space. We know that revolution is not a one time event and ask what unspent fuel remains from previous struggles to be reignited today? What can we learn from those who are on the front lines as we seek to imagine and build a more just, equitable world and how can we engage in constructing. ↩

'With respect to land and chattel, possession may well have started as a physical fact, but possession today is often an abstraction... except in the most abstract way, it is not possible to speak of the possession of intangible property.' - Brittanica ↩

Rematriation: The Indigenous concept of Rematriation refers to reclaiming of ancestral remains, spirituality, culture, knowledge and resources, instead of the more Patriarchally associated Repatriation. It simply means back to Mother Earth, a return to our origins, to life and co-creation, rather than Patriarchal destruction and colonisation, a reclamation of germination. ↩

Reconstruction
Repair
Reparation
Rehearsal
Refusal
Re-appropriation?
Redress differs from reparation in that it is not a compensation for loss—loss is immeasurable—but is rather an articulation of that loss. —Tavia Nyong’o, “Conclusion,” Afro-fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 202. Re-enchantment ↩

“What kinds of ethical viewing and reading practices must we employ, now, in the face of these onslaughts? What might practices of Black annotation and Black redaction offer?” - Christina Sharpe, In the Wake ↩

“Modern logistics (...) is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave (...) But the Atlantic slave trade was also the birth of modern logistics because modern logistics is not just about how to transport large amounts of commodities or information or energy, or even how to move these efficiently, but also about the sociopathic demand for access: topographical, jurisdictional, but as importantly bodily and social access.” - HARNEY, Stephen Matthias; FRAPORTTI, Mattia; and CUPINI, Niccolo. Logistics Genealogies: A dialogue with Stefano Harney. (2018). Social Text. 1-16. Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6228 ↩

"This requires the production of a science of loss, which is to say the science of whiteness, or, logistics." https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1032(Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. All Incomplete. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2021.) ↩

Shout out to Hanif Abdurraqib who reminds us that "community is an intentional act." We see ILS as a germ, a seed, a glitch that can provoke this process - as a space of study in university but not of university, an undercommons (thank you Stefano Harney and Fred Moten for giving us vocabulary), a third university in which we dream as we ride the ruin. (thank you la paperson for showing us that “within the colonizing university also exists a decolonizing education.” la paperson. A Third University Is Possible. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.) A reminder that within the Royal College of Art there is also a radical college of art. (thank you RCA UCU) ↩

"The future is no one's property; no need to shackle it. Not otherwise as in political horizon awaits, otherwise as in, a firm embrace of the unknowable; the unknowable as in, a well of infinity I want us to fall down together. Otherwise: the future is now and all those political promises we make to one another, all the wishing and hoping in earnest (say it three times like a spell: wishing and hopeing, wishing and hoping, wishing and hoping), all the leaps from the edges of bridges and mountaintops, all the reaching for and around, all the drug-taking and sex everywhere-we-should-not, all the serious study and strategy, theorising and making anew, all the breakeges that slice historical space-time—all those movements that clear space and mark our struggle to live free, live better, love more, to knit abundance, all that is the work of another ealm that is not-there." Olufemi, Lola. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Maidstone: Hajar Press, 2021. Lola was our guest in Co-liberation ILS 2020/21 together with Focus E15, in a session “People need homes, give them keys!” ↩