To Hold Things Together is a two-day symposium focusing on modes of social and institutional nodality and protocols of encounter and solidarity in our hyper-local and hyper-dispersed existence. It concludes the first year of the Vera List Center’s program cycle As for Protocols, and is curated by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and presented by the VLC. Compositing real and speculative community and institutional models and proposing theoretical and practical elements of coalitional exchange, the symposium’s discursive strands seek to build aesthetic, poetic, and tactical forms of research, assembly, mobilization, and co-creation amid fraught unfolding realities. The symposium resonates, in motivation and format, with the VLC’s As for Protocols seminars that came before and can be accessed here.

DAY TWO: SPECTRAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Three-part seminar and discussion with freethought (Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Massimiliano Mollona, Louis Moreno, Irit Rogoff, and Nora Sternfeld) and guest Denise Ferreira da Silva.
Over three consecutive sessions, freethought introduces the concept and applications of “spectral infrastructure,” a term that alludes to the hidden and invisible textures that sustain an undefinable and disruptive quality in an otherwise seemingly efficient organism. Continuing from the collective’s long-term research into material and organizational infrastructures, spectral infrastructure pursues an understanding of the “ephemeral glue,” or that which is invisible, inaudible, and illegible but nevertheless elicits a response and informs a reality that can be found echoing around existing structures. Spectral infrastructure holds things together by underwriting the subjectivity of an institution, of an intellectual and political drive, a beat or a rhythm, a gaze or a gesture, or momentary mutuality or a collective affect. The research moves speculatively from the binding forms of material and data infrastructures toward intangible intensities as a coalescing force.
 
SEMINAR 
Spectral Labor and Unpayable Debt
11 am–12:10 pm EDT 
What will a post-pandemic future economy look like if viewed through a contemporary archaeology of labor? Focusing on ghostly economies—not the invisible, offshore or black economy of finance capital—but those which exist as monstrous appendages of the everyday, this trajectory considers the infrastructures implied by the ghosts of the work that will be rendered obsolete, automated, and de-functionalized, and also those within the new modes of dwelling and living off the surplus population. These concerns intersect with Ferreira da Silva’s forthcoming book, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2021), which apprehends these modes and conditions through a “poethical” lens, and weaves together structures of raciality and coloniality with the machinations of global capital.

Speakers:
Stefano Harney, author and researcher;
Massimiliano Mollona, writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist, and Senior Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London;
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Break 20 min 

SEMINAR 
Fugitivity and Endurance (What is the Time of Spectral Infrastructure?)
12:30–1:40 pm EDT 
Major political challenges of our age, such as ecological catastrophe, racial injustice, technological acceleration, and violent economic exclusion, are deeply sedimented historical formations whose wakes and potential cures traverse centuries of struggle. How does the longue durée of social and political transformation, and its transgenerational nature, alter our understanding of agency, radical labor, and struggle itself? Is the tension between the immediacy of fugitive forces of radical action and the slow cumulative invisible work of enduring a sign of a spectral infrastructure? This session looks towards forging the relation between moments and processes of struggles over protracted temporalities and aesthetic forms.

Speakers:
Adrian Heathfield, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, University of Roehampton, London; 
Nora Sternfeld, Professor of Art Education at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg, Hamburg

Break 20 min

SEMINAR 
Sediments and Residues 
2–3:10 pm EDT 
Gentrification processes sift the spatial unconscious of cities for residues of urban creativity and radical sociality to stabilize the financial fantasy of “urban regeneration.” Similarly, the reputational capital of educational institutions is built on the rejected moments of radicality that sediment together to a “frisson” of excitement that cannot be traced back to any continuous presence. The components of such excess deposits may be found in the very fabrics of environments and institutions. Or they may come to form a spectral infrastructure that haunts these spaces and will not let them calcify as the profit machines of human capital they are so desperate to become.

Speakers:
Louis Moreno, urbanist and theorist and Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London;
Irit Rogoff, writer, teacher, curator, and organizer, and Professor of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths London University

The program expands over two days, each led by a distinctive tactic and site of investigation. Presentations blend lectures, conversations, performances, and artistic interventions. All sessions feature American Sign Language interpretation and live captioning.

Please register for each session/day on the individual page:

As for Protocols–To Hold Things Together: Day One

Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). A Dialogue About Making Art in a Good Way

As for Protocols—To Hold Things Together is the concluding event of the first year of the Vera List Center’s program cycle As for Protocols, and is curated by BAK and presented and hosted by the VLC. BAK and the VLC act as coalitional partners here, with the long-term goal of more closely aligning their support of developing political imaginaries through artistic practice.

The VLC’s participation is made possible, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, the Kettering Fund, the Selma Yomtov Schwartz Endowment, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust, as well as the members of the Vera List Center Board.

BAK’s participation is made possible, in part, through financial contributions by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and the Municipality of Utrecht.