Drawing on the work of Jamaican writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter, these weaving stories sessions focus on her concept of the plot as a historical material space, a narrative technology, and a practice of being human. Each session will introduce key aspects of Wynter’s thinking and feature an activation led by an invited guest collaborator.

Wynter argues that colonial capitalist systems organise societies and economies, and shape, secure and enforce a dominant notion of what it means to be human: one based on economic value, possessive whiteness, and separation from nature. This overdetermined genre of the human incentivises us to behave as perpetually productive entrepreneurs and consumers, while rendering other ways of living deviant or unsustainable.

Wynter calls for this dominant notion of the human to be unsettled. One way to begin this work is through the concept of the plot. In Wynter’s writing, the plot stands for material and conceptual counter narratives, spaces, and modes of being that exist within-and-against the dominant logic of property, extraction, and exchange. We approach the plot as ambiguous spaces: at once products of capitalist capture and enclosure, and sites where different genres of being are rehearsed through collective narration and spatial praxis.

Abolish the Human questions the dominant genre of the human, naturalised as universal. Throughout the series, we explore different aspects of the plot, as well as the narrative, social, and spatial practices that cultivate other forms of being and social relations.

In this first session of Abolish the Human, Patricia de Vries, head of the research group Art & Spatial Praxis, will introduce her ongoing research on the plot as a praxis. The introduction is followed by a presentation and a screening of Tactics of the Plot (2025), by Laura Dubourjal. The video documents a series of workshops that brought together cultural workers whose social and artistic practices are entangled with neoliberal market structures and their instrumentalisation. Over the course of the workshops, participants collectively shared and explored their methods of resistance, coping, and imagination.

Following the screening and subsequent discussion, Iliada Charalambous will invite us to collectively read texts on and unpack the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement’s notion of the free personality, a subject formation that seeks to cultivate individuals liberated from the constraints of patriarchy, state oppression, and capitalist modernity. We will work collectively to create a single shared set of notes on the topics discussed throughout the event.

All are welcome to join to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and reflect on the theoretical and material manifestations that speak to the plot. You can sign up here.

For our free events we work with sign-up forms so that we know who to expect, and can plan accordingly.

Weaving Stories is a series organised by ARIAS and curated by Nienke Scholts. It invites artist-researchers or research collectives to explore and interrogate a specific research theme across multiple sessions with participants. In a context where opportunities for slow, in-depth exchange are increasingly limited, weaving stories provides space to gather around diverse perspectives and approaches to doing research.

Art & Spatial Praxis at Rietveld Sandberg Research focuses on artistic and academic interventions in spatial, institutional, and digital enclosures. Headed by Patricia de Vries and coordinated by Laura Dubourjal, the research group explores the practices of makers and thinkers whose work resonates with Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the plot. It approaches the plot as a methodological framework, asking how artists, activists, and scholars can challenge institutional and capitalist norms to cultivate alternative forms of understanding, being, and social relations.

Iliada Charalambous is a Cypriot visual artist whose practice centres on assembling and collective political education. Through her work, she collaborates with diverse communities to reflect on the commons, explore methods and tools for collective organising, and imagine potential forms of resistance. She is currently developing the program Assembling in Resistance at BAK (Basis voor Actuele Kunst), which is structured around the assembly artwork What Are Your Flowers? She collaborated with Serda Demir on the series True Counterpower at the Van Abbemuseum and leads the political education program Reading Counterpower at Gemaal op Zuid, Rotterdam. She has completed the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice (2023–24).