Online discussion with Pip Day, Dalaeja Foreman, and Suzanne Kite, moderated by Irmgard Emmelhainz

Join us on Tuesday, August 17, 2021, at 1pm EST for an online discussion with Pip Day, Dalaeja Foreman, and Suzanne Kite, moderated by Irmgard Emmelhainz.

Ethnography in the 21st century has delivered images of vanishing populations made redundant or communities self-destroying, appearing as the collateral damage of the globalization of modernity. Ethnography today, moreover, only makes sense ethically and politically as autoethnography or as ethnographic fiction, as opposed to the ethnographer-as-subject delivering his or her point of view in relationship to an alien community. The works in this program draw a constellation of the contemporary discourses we are working with to frame the remnants of colonial alterity: decolonization as restitution, the unresolved contradictions of class and race polarization, human rights as an apparatus to deal with mass political and climate refugees, and empathy as the emotion that will fix all these problems.

The discussion accompanies the films in “Frames for Alterity (Ethnography, Human Rights, Class, and Race),” the fourth and final program of the series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization, curated by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series concludes with a repeat of all films from parts one through four on August 18.

Watch the films and read more about the series here.

Pip Day is a curator, writer, educator, and advisor based in Berlin and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang/Montréal with a practice of long-term collaborative research, programming and change-making within cultural institutions. As Director/Curator at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art in Tiohtià:ke between 2012 and 2020, she instituted social-justice oriented programs and developed dozens of exhibitions, events, research, and collaborative actions including Sovereignty; Água Viva (after Clarice Lispector); and Colors: for 14 women’s voices (after Julius Eastman), among others. She has worked with artists, writers, and curators including Anna Boghiguian, Dana Michel, Ursula Johnson, Sepake Angiama, Jackie Wang, Zacharias Kunuk, Irmgard Emmelhainz, María Berríos, Pablo Lafuente, Suzanne Kite, Harun Farocki, Atelier Céladon, Layli Long Soldier, Maria Hupfield, Sarah Pierce, Rike Frank, Tania Bruguera, Pablo Sigg, Ashon Crawley, and many others. She was Co-Curator of the 2016 Santa Fe Biennial and recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Curatorial Research Fellowship for the project Spatial Practices in Revolution at Centro Tlatelolco, Mexico City (2011 to present). Pip founded the research organization el-instituto in Mexico City in 2008 and was founder and director of teratoma’s Residencias Internacionales en México (RIM) and Estudios Curatoriales, the first curatorial studies program in Latin America, both in 2002. Prior to that Pip was Curator at Artists Space in New York City. She has taught on curatorial and contemporary art postgraduate programs at Bard College and the Royal College among others. She was a Lecturer at Goldsmiths’ MFA in Curating. She has published and lectured extensively across Europe and the Americas.

Dalaeja Foreman (she/they) is a community organizer, curator, cultural worker, and first-generation Caribbean-Brooklynite. As a hood-intellectual, their work focuses on political education, Black and Indigenous Autonomy, and community control through community preservation. Radical pedagogy, reclaiming public space, and liberatory action are central to Dalaeja’s curatorial and organizing practices. Specifically with the goal of prototyping counter-hegemonic ideologies and actions, combating internalized misconceptions oppressed people have of ourselves, and emphasizing resistance through direct action and cultural production. She is one of three founders of the woodworking cooperative, breadfruit (https://www.instagram.com/breadfruitbreadfruit/).

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School; and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Kite’s scholarship and practice highlight contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Her performances, compositions, sculptures and sound installations showcase the use of experimentation in new media and digital technologies that touch on issues such as nonhuman and human intelligence, the ethics of extractive technologies, and software design. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fibre sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. For the inaugural 2019 Toronto Art Biennial, Kite, with Althea Thauberger, produced an installation, Call to Arms, which features audio and video recordings of their rehearsals with Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) York, which also consisted of a live performance with the conch shell sextet, who played the four musical scores composed by Kite. Kite has also published extensively in several journals and magazines, including in the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines,” co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis, was featured. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her book Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2019. The translated expanded version of The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion is coming out this fall with SUNY Press, and so is Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance (Vanderbilt). She is a member of the SNCA in Mexico (National System for Arts Creators).

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.