Cruising with Craft to the End of the World: Practices of shattering, becoming scyborg and dancing with dragons as possible cartographies
Cruising with Craft to the End of the World: Practices of shattering, becoming scyborg and dancing with dragons as possible cartographies
This seminar will focus on what lambert refers to as "The Beast", which is an assemblage currently in process and functioning as thesis, draft, material, and tool among other things. "The Beast" will be exposed through pre-material to allow for discussing possibilities and potentials of how to adjust and further assemble and work with it. Not so much for clarity, but to further develop senses of understanding.
Please message Mathew Gregory for pre-materials: mathew.gregory@konstfack.se
Conversation Opponent
Adrian Heathfield, Curator, Writer, Professor of Visual Cultures 23/24, Goldsmiths, University of London, Emeritus Professor, University of Roehampton, London
Supervisors
Michell Zethson, Senior Lecturer in Theory and Writing, Konstfack
Rebecca Hilton, Acting Vice-Rector for Research, Professor of Choreography for the profile area Site, Event, Encounter, Stockholm’s University of the Arts
Dr Ellen Røed, Vice-Chancellor, Professor of Film and Media, 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.
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 and land there is an urgency to develop ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms. 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, allowing joy and pleasure to become crucial in developing alternative models of institutional existence.
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. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Art and Design (New York), Homografiska Museet (Dals Långed, Sweden) The Havgapet Collection, (Sleneset, Norway) and published in texts such as Cultural Affairs: Art Without Borders published by Degruyter. lambert was a 2020 Curatorial Fellow at Center for Craft (Ashville, U.S.) and holds an MA in Critical Craft Theory from Warren Wilson College and an MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. lambert has actively contributed writing to Studio Magazine (CA), C Magazine (CA), Metalsmith (US), Klimt02 (ES), The Vessel (NO), Surface Design Journal (US), Art Jewelry Forum (US), and Garland (AUS) and maintains a running column titled "Settings and Findings" in Lost in Jewellery Magazine (ITLY). They were the guest editor of Decorating Dissidence Journal, issue #15, "Tools, Use, Mastery".