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Arnolfini - est 1961


Due to unforeseen circumstances this event has been postponed until further notice. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

An Open Reading Group event with Diásporas Críticas. 

A week before the referendum in which the UK votes on European Union membership, Diásporas Críticas call for a series of exercises in enunciation, contagion and transmission of post-national poetic-political strategies.

Joining us remotely via live-feed from Ecuador, Diásporas Críticas lead a performative reading group exploring how “elsewheres” are constructed through politics of exclusion. Using two powerful texts as a starting point, the event will investigate the marginalisation of ethnic minorities in European history and the agency of informal networks and self-organised groups in areas such as hip-hop and intersectional feminism.

In European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (2006), Fatima El-Tayeb studies the tactics used throughout European hip-hop and queer of colour and feminist practices in the 1980s and 1990s, recovering the critical “post-national” force of these informal networks of self- and collective production.

Through the character of Regina II (a reference to various historical racialized members of European royal families) in performance Brown Girl in the Ring (1999) Valerie Mason-John explores the specific ways in which Britain ignores, silences, infantilizes, forgets or erases the contributions of minorities to European history.

About Diásporas Críticas

Diásporas Críticas is a platform for artistic research that functions as a space of resistance to the neoliberal politics of racial and sexual surveillance. The platform began in the neighborhood of Raval in Barcelona, and is produced by Verónica Lahitte (Buenos Aires, 1980), visual artist; Rebecca Close (London, 1987), researcher and writer; Anyely Marín Cisneros (Caracas, 1977) researcher, professor and producer of social television. Through the activation of a collection of historical texts originally written to be enunciated (the manifesto, the poetic-political text), they experiment with the production of new stages for enunciation. They are particularly engaged in projects that trace the routes and modes of transmission of strategies of resistance between Europe, Latin America and North America, exploring the focus points of contagion between multiple projects of self- and collective production. 

Reading list: 

Chapter 1: “Stranger in my own country” in El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 

Mason John. Valerie. Brown Girl in the Ring, London: Get a Grip Publishers Ltd. 1999

Recommended further reading:

Chapter 2: ‘Dimensions of Diasporas’ El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006

This event is free but numbers are limited. Book your tickets to avoid disappointment. Contact the Visitor Services on 0117 917 2300 or boxoffice@arnolfini.org.uk to reserve your place.

This event is part of the Art from Elsewhere Programme