output – essay
The Art & Spatial Praxis research group is proud to announce the publication of three new contributions on its Plot(ting) platform. Each of these articles explore language and its various registers; the colonial historicity of form, identity and structure; the affective, imaginative and reparative possibilities to be found in the midst of manufactured chaos.
A Young Cowboy First Saw the Light by Philip Coyne questions the category of Man––drawing on Sylvia Wynter––through the literature of John Donne, Ralph Ellison, and Octavia Butler. In notes towards an otherwise by gervaise alexis savvias, they beckon us to think towards a sociopolitical otherwise––staging an incisive reflection on poetry as a form of social poesis and underpinned by a deep engagement with Wynter and contemporary Black radical thought. Break Down, or: Dismantling the House that Narrative Built by Moosje Moti Goosen traces narrativisations' pitfalls in political and epistemic contexts, with her own personal ailment serving as both entry and departure point. In tandem, these contributions are a call to refuse the social monikers simply given to us; rethink our loyalty to the language of coloniality; to imagine otherwise. Read more on the Plot(ting) website: plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl
Philip Coyne, A Young Cowboy First Saw the Light
Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s notion and questioning of the category of Man, alongside an analysis of Baruch Spinoza’s thinking around affect, Philip Coyne guides us through a materialist-cum-speculative analysis of the descriptive and abstracted marker of ‘Man’. By analysing the character Doro from Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, Ralph Ellison’s Narration/Invisible Man, and the poet John Donne, Coyne argues for a process of material mediation, or otherwise embodied praxis, towards a refortified sense of self.
Philip Coyne, A Young Cowboy First Saw the Light
Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s notion and questioning of the category of Man, alongside an analysis of Baruch Spinoza’s thinking around affect, Philip Coyne guides us through a materialist-cum-speculative analysis of the descriptive and abstracted marker of ‘Man’. By analysing the character Doro from Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, Ralph Ellison’s Narration/Invisible Man, and the poet John Donne, Coyne argues for a process of material mediation, or otherwise embodied praxis, towards a refortified sense of self.
Philip Coyne is an artist, writer and educator, originally from the UK and now based in the Netherlands. Using sculpture, text, drawing and painting, his work looks to study and instantiate a poetics of social life; this is to say that he thinks about, writes about and attempts to produce work through the speculative forms of production that are endemic to both our social lives and social, or relational, life in general. Conversely, he focuses on the historic and fraught relationship between individuation and modern art, tracing the contours of this relationship in an attempt to envisage what a more genuinely collective form of art might look like.
gervaise alexis savvias, notes towards an otherwise
A voice interrupts.
Precipitated by a chance encounter with their grandmother’s manuscripts recounting the British Empire’s colonial expansion and extractivism in Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia), gervaise alexis savvias explores spectrality as an errant entry point, the plot––as per Sylvia Wynter––as a linguistic stand-in for the otherwise, and the ossification of language in the present moment. Drawing on Black radical thought and theory, they argue that poetry, figured as a form of social poiesis, provides an alternative to the barbarity of colonialism: its violent tonality, foreclosure of possibility, and stratifying logic.
They remind us that while the otherwise is punctilious, it is also patient.
Interweaved throughout the text, readers will also find a series of soundscapes produced in collaboration with Andreas Yakovlev Michaelides (YAKOVLEV). Moving away from the audio-essay as a strict and somewhat–clinical format, these sonic works are presented as a means to commune with the spectral chorus that runs throughout ‘notes towards an otherwise’.
A voice interrupts.
Precipitated by a chance encounter with their grandmother’s manuscripts recounting the British Empire’s colonial expansion and extractivism in Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia), gervaise alexis savvias explores spectrality as an errant entry point, the plot––as per Sylvia Wynter––as a linguistic stand-in for the otherwise, and the ossification of language in the present moment. Drawing on Black radical thought and theory, they argue that poetry, figured as a form of social poiesis, provides an alternative to the barbarity of colonialism: its violent tonality, foreclosure of possibility, and stratifying logic.
They remind us that while the otherwise is punctilious, it is also patient.
Interweaved throughout the text, readers will also find a series of soundscapes produced in collaboration with Andreas Yakovlev Michaelides (YAKOVLEV). Moving away from the audio-essay as a strict and somewhat–clinical format, these sonic works are presented as a means to commune with the spectral chorus that runs throughout ‘notes towards an otherwise’.
gervaise alexis savvias is a Zambian-Cypriot writer and artist-researcher currently based between Amsterdam, NL and Nicosia, CY. Their practice figures itself through an entanglement of speculative historiography, experimental sound, cultural criticism, hauntology, and the mysticism of the chance encounter. They are currently compiling a publication of their collected writings on spectrality, chance, and notes towards a sociopolitical otherwise
Moosje Moti Goosen, Break Down, Or: Dismantling the House that Narrative Built
Written from inside a hospital room, Break Down interrogates the narrative architectures that prescribe coherence, authority and legibility over academic and literary forms. Weaving Wynter’s notion of the plot and plantation in the context of the ongoing genocide of Palestinian life; the pitfalls of epistemic language, and Goosen’s own experience fighting chronic illness, we are invited to consider what kinds of practices and modes of being can emerge when we refuse normative narrativisation and the coloniality of our imagination?
What other forms of writing manifest when they emerge precisely from a space like the hospital, or the interruptions of the ‘unreliable body’?
Written from inside a hospital room, Break Down interrogates the narrative architectures that prescribe coherence, authority and legibility over academic and literary forms. Weaving Wynter’s notion of the plot and plantation in the context of the ongoing genocide of Palestinian life; the pitfalls of epistemic language, and Goosen’s own experience fighting chronic illness, we are invited to consider what kinds of practices and modes of being can emerge when we refuse normative narrativisation and the coloniality of our imagination?
What other forms of writing manifest when they emerge precisely from a space like the hospital, or the interruptions of the ‘unreliable body’?
Moosje M Goosen is a writer and researcher based in Rotterdam. Since being diagnosed with a progressive lung disease in 2013, which led to a bilateral lung transplant in 2017, her relationship with work has shifted. Ongoing care for her body and donor lungs, along with an unpredictable post-transplant health condition, has made Moosje more ambivalent about defining herself solely through work. Writing and reading are part of her daily routine, often done without the notion of "work" attached. For her, writing is a way to engage with the raw texture of life and is her primary method of thinking, whether in analytical, experimental prose, or poetry. Moosje’s work moves fluidly between disciplines, from literature to art, between writing genres, and between academic and artistic research. Ultimately, she is most interested in the many forms and lives of language—the “spark of being” (as Mary Shelley wrote in Frankenstein) brought to life through writing.
The research group Art & Spatial Praxis launched the digital artistic research platform Plot(ting) on April 17th 2024. Plot(ting) emerges as a publishing platform showcasing art, research, and spatial practices. Currently it harbors contributions by Philip Coyne, gervaise alexis savvias, Moosje Moti Goosen, Blaue Distanz, Amelia Groom, M. Ty, Flavia Pinheiro, Giulia Damiani, Francisca Khamis & Maia Gattás Vargas, Neeltje ten Westenend & Hanneke Stuit, Mariana Balvanera, Patricia de Vries, and Liza Prins.
The Art & Spatial Praxis research group is proud to announce the publication of three new articles featuring queer and anti-colonial perspectives on its Plot(ting) platform.
The research group Art & Spatial Praxis launched the digital artistic research platform Plot(ting) on April 17th 2024. Plot(ting) emerges as a publishing platform showcasing art, research, and spatial practices. Currently it harbors contributions by Flavia Pinheiro, Giulia Damiani, Francisca Khamis & Maia Gattás Vargas, Neeltje ten Westenend & Hanneke Stuit, Mariana Balvanera, Patricia de Vries, Amelia Groom, and Liza Prins. Here you can read in brief about the different contributions. Read more on the plotting website: plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl
research group
Art & Spatial Praxis
Art & Spatial Praxis
project
Plot(ting)
Plot(ting)