Cruising with Craft to the Ends of the Worlds:
Practices of shattering, becoming scyborg and dancing with dragons as possible cartographies
This seminar will attempt movements to find (a/the)shoal(s). Using lamberts work as material a discussion of the relationships of various materiality and how they collectively produce the work will be undertaken. Interrogating how substrates, images, documents, texts, and formats collectively function to embody and become the thesis through a developed method of cruising. Through doing and the recognition of possible cartographies we will search for (a/the)shoal(s). It is not about fully understanding what is read, the monography or explanatory text is decentralized as the final output in lamberts research creation/artistic practice-based research practice. It is about feeling the vibrations and threads, finding the coded language by some while accepting opacity for others, no two understanding will be the same. As soon as we have stable footing the tides will shift the precarious ground under our feet.
To register for the seminar and receive seminar materials please email Mat Gregory: mathew.gregory@konstfack.se
*NOTE: If you need help finding the doctoral project space, please meet at Konstfack’s Infocenter at 12:55
Conversation Opponent
Natasha Marie Llorens, Professor in Art Theory, the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm Sweden
Supervisors
Michell Zethson, Senior Lecturer in Theory and Writing, Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Rebecca Hilton, Professor of Choreography for the profile area Site, Event, Encounter, Stockholm’s University of the Arts
lambert's research is an investigation of cruising with craft as a companion to explore how its languages and discourses contribute to processes of equity such as decolonization and can challenge ivory tower academic structures through its cracks and margins, the place of the undercommons. Thinking with craft becomes essential in scyborgism. As la paperson defines in A Third University is Possible a scyborg "is a queer turn of word that I offer to you to name the structural agency of persons who have picked colonial technologies and reassembled them to decolonizing purposes." la paperson uses the scyborg within the academic institution to use the resources given for decolonial purposes when reconfigured. There is interest in how this idea can be expanded to other institutions such as the archive and the museum as well as the academy and artistic practice-based research with craft as a companion. Craft becomes crucial for its direct connection to the colonial framing of human and non-human and forces the consideration of the individual as well as the collective simultaneously.
Collaborating and kinship making with artists and institutions of a vast array of disciplines has the potential to reassemble or reconfigure the current cultural systems of queerness and body politics while shattering the boundaries academically imposed on craft as a field. Unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of cultural institutions, land and water there is an urgency to develop ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms. lambert deploys the shoal or sandbar in reference to the work of Tiffany Lethabo King’s work The Black Shoals to allow for constant shifting(s) and assemblage(s) to produce vibrations, meanings and embodied understandings. Through Natalie Loveless’s development of polydisciplinamory, a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating creates systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at in regard to the othered body. These methods centralize joy and pleasure, making them crucial in developing alternative models of institutional existence.
Bio
matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working towards equity, inclusion, and reparation. Their practice is based in polydisciplinamory, entangling making, writing, curating, collaborating, and performing. They have published, curated, exhibited, and are collected internationally. lambert was a 2020 Curatorial Fellow at Center for Craft (Ashville, U.S.) and a research fellow at Australia National University and holds an MA in Critical Craft Theory from Warren Wilson College and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. They have actively contributed writing to numerous international publications, most recently contributing the chapter “Avoiding Unnecessary Harm: Craft in Service of the Master’s End” to “texturen vol.9 “ published by Logos Verlag Berlin. They were also the guest editor of Decorating Dissidence Journal, issue #15, Tools, Use, Mastery. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Art and Design (New York), the Huston MFA (Texas, U.S.) Homografiska Museet (Dals Långed, SWE) The Havgapet Collection, (Sleneset, NO) and published in texts such as Cultural Affairs: Art Without Borders published by Degruyter.