Loophole of Retreat
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice
Loophole of Retreat
October 7–9, 2022, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice
As part of her exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, Simone Leigh will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world for a major project, Loophole of Retreat: Venice.
Organized by Rashida Bumbray with curatorial advisors Saidiya Hartman, University Professor at Columbia University, and Tina Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, the three-day symposium will comprise dialogue, performances, and presentations centered on Black women’s intellectual and creative labor.
Loophole of Retreat: Venice builds on an eponymous one-day convening held in 2019 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The conceptual frame is drawn from the 1861 autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman who, for seven years after her escape, lived in a crawlspace she described as a “loophole of retreat.” Jacobs claimed this site as simultaneously an enclosure and a space for enacting practices of freedom—practices of thinking, planning, writing, and imagining new forms of freedom.
“Connections Between Spiritual and Artistic Practice”,
an interview for Critical Bounds Podcast
“Connections Between Spiritual and Artistic Practice”, an interview for Critical Bounds Podcast
A conversation with Negarra A. Kudumu -- "independent scholar, author of the e-book Spiritual Hygiene, and healer working at the intersection of art and healing with a focus on contemporary art from Africa, South Asia, and their respective diasporas as well as African Diasporic knowledge systems. She holds the title of Yayi Nkisi Malongo in the Brama Con Brama lineage of Palo Mayombe; she is a lay person in the Lukumi Pimienta lineage; a practitioner of Espiritismo Cruzado, and a level II Reiki practitioner."
Mad Vibrations: A Humming Ritual for Untrustworthy Narrators
by Amal Alhaag and Maria Guggenbichler
Mad Vibrations: A Humming Ritual for Untrustworthy Narrators by Amal Alhaag and Maria Guggenbichler
District, Berlin (Germany), October 20, 2018. Click to access opening and closing meditations.
With an opening and ending meditation, conceived by Negarra A. Kudumu Mad Vibrations: A Humming Ritual for Untrustworthy Narrators side-steps the cruelty of colonial modernity, and focuses on the radical, renegade voices of decolonial struggles who demand different realities for themselves through various forms of self-care and exchanges via diasporic and pan-african networks, connections, echoes and re-sonances. These decolonial vibrations and voices found their waves and ways while experiencing prohibition and criminalization. By using improvised or coded language, dance, music or non-verbal communication, which was often read as inaudible, made from scratch, unreliable, inconsistent, mad and incomprehensible forms of exchanges between enslaved and colonial subjects people managed to move below the radar of the systems of slavery and colonialism.
Image: Amal Alhaag & Maria Guggenbichler, Mad Vibrations: A Humming Ritual for Untrustworthy Narrators, 2018, Photo: Kim Bode