[Kunst Afrikas] Research colloquium for the Arts of Africa | TAO LEIGH GOFFE ‘Black Geologies: Race, Magma, Temporality’ (13.6.2023, 18 c.t., online via Webex)

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Dear students, colleagues and friends of the Colloquium for the Arts of Africa,

The next session of our colloquium for the Arts of Africa will take place online on Tuesday, June 13, 2023 from 18:15-19:45. We look forward to welcome there the writer, theorist and interdisciplinary artist Tao Leigh Goffe.
We cordially invite you and interested guests to the lecture. Everybody is welcome!

TAO LEIGH GOFFE
‘Black Geologies: Race, Magma, Temporality’

June 13, 2023 at 18.15
Online via Webex: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=maffcb7144105d2dfdeb571bfcfff013c
(Meeting-Kennnummer: 2734 842 7671, Über Videosystem beitreten: Wählen Sie 27348427671@fu-berlin.webex.com; Über Telefon beitreten: +49-619-6781-9736 Germany Toll, +49-89-95467578 Germany Toll 2, Zugriffscode: 2734 842 7671)

[Jamaica Mountain View.png]
Black Geologies: Race, Magma, Temporality

Natural disasters are marked by the spectre of premature death in ways that consistently underscore how vulnerable Black life is under colonial time. Beyond the timescale of the Anthropocene, this talk explores life-generating philosophies of geology through Caribbean art. Spanning the Black diasporic world, in what ways does the volcano come to function as a timekeeper that resets colonial time? Looking to the mountain as a mother, what are the foundational myths that ground Black thought within and against European theories of geology? In these works, an aesthetic of Black prophecy is shaped by looking within the Earth to measure the passage of time. Anchored by the shifting tectonic plates of the African continent, Caribbean artists and writers draw on environmental themes and materiality to examine the meaning and formation of race. An aesthetic that attends to what is “not yet standardized” about Black time and its precarity emerges. At once moldable and malleable like magma, time is molten and full of possibility like lava not yet settled. With blackness constantly in formation across the diaspora, theories of Black geology explored here grapple with how the time zone of the transatlantic slave trade informs new temporalities that require the abolition of time itself.


About the Colloquium for the Arts of Africa:
The colloquium invites researchers, artists, curators, and activists to present different critical approaches to cross-cultural knowledge transfer in the arts at this very moment in history to our student body and teaching staff. The colloquium is an (online) forum to debate current research and work in progress that is sensitive to hegemony and power relations in artistic and academic networks. https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/khi/schwerpunkte/abteilung_afrika/Kolloquium/index.html

With kind regards,
Celia Schmidt
In the name of the Arts of Africa


Freie Universität Berlin
FB Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften
Kunsthistorisches Institut
Abteilung Kunst Afrikas
Sekretariat: Celia Schmidt, M.A.
Koserstr. 20 (A 3.08), 14195 Berlin
Telefon: +49-(0)30-838-55286, Fax: +49-(0)30-838-4-55286
kunstafrikas@zedat.fu-berlin.de<mailto:kunstafrikas@zedat.fu-berlin.de>