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Rest/Unrest: Notes on Loitering
Keynote Presentation: mONSTERFERENCE, University of Arts, Helsinki, Finland
www.monsterference.org | 2020
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mOnsterference, organised by Karolina Kucia and HM Ouramo, organised under the UniArts program (December 2020) was a multiday gathering on cooperation and organisational structures of art production. On how they fail, how they preserve the troubles and hauntings rather than change, and how they may use and abuse the power.
The delivered keynote lecture incorporates a multitude of tools– video, animation, speech, text, exercises and live overhead projection.
Summary of the Keynote:
The streets hold the possibility of being a hegemonic site where power is exerted, expressed, and challenged. It is a complex yet uncontained petri dish where anonymity meets identity; thus making it a fertile ground of study. Rest/Unrest: Notes on Loitering is a lecture-performance viewing public and social spaces as contact zones which further replicate and proliferate these existing patterns into everyday work, safety and leisure.
Drawing from ongoing feminist actions (essentially in Indian and Pakistan) organised by women’s collectives who through the path of inaction attempt to activate spaces that are often denied to them. By the reclamation of public spaces through the act of simply being present and visible, the session proposes loitering or hanging about while supposedly doing nothing, as a singular tool of resistance for collectives as well as for individuals.
