In this Collaboratory we will explore cracks as a place of emergence, a liminal space to embrace, inhabit, embody and from which the monster may appear…
This will be an experimental/ practical workshop, led by materials: please bring any materials (clay, material, wood, wire, ink, paper, any stuff!) that you are drawn to working with/that in some way might help embody cracks/monsters.
Venue to follow (but probably Bangor or thereabouts)
There is lots of great writing about cracks, not least by Bayo Akomalafe:
“I think about cracks like disturbances in the field that invite us to take a new direction.
When a crack appears in the mighty wall, the only thing scarier than letting it grow unbridled, the only thing more worrisome than allowing it to breathe, is sealing it up — for the thesis of the crack is to call into question the form we’ve assumed, the nobilities we cherish, the stories we assume to be true. The crack is the monster’s gift — a reminder that the fixity of the postures we take on often prove more dangerous than the threats we presume to withstand.
“The monster is the crossroads. The monster is a dense and intelligent turn in the pattern of things. It’s when things don’t go according to plan, it’s when things refuse to be instrumental to our purposes. It’s when things take a left turn, when we expect them to take a right. That’s the monster, right? The monster, I feel, is a troubling place of deep failure for modernity.
We’re doing our very best to try to flatten monsters, to try to colonize them, to name them, finally to name them the enemy and get rid of them. A monster is climate chaos like we’re doing our darndest to defeat climate change, to defeat it, right? Not considering that we are imbricated with this thing. There is something speculatively powerful about the specter of a monster down the street and we’re doing our best to defeat it.
When I think monsters are the engines, the machines of the universe, to invite us to lose our way. And the only way to do something different with the world is to lose our way. So how do we convene a politics that allows us to sit with novelty? So I’m reconceiving politics as the communal effort, and it may not even come down to community as homogeneity, but the effort to sit with trouble, to sit with monster, to decorate the crossroads.
How we present that moment, those misdirections, those failures might be the heart of a new kind of politics that we need today”