Jan 25 2025

Black Earth Study Club: Languaging the End of the World with Denise Ferreira da Silva and J. Kameron Carter

Sat | 2PM

On the occasion of Nolan Oswald Dennis’s exhibition, overturns, SI is pleased to present the first convening of the Black Earth Study Club—a series of transdisciplinary gatherings informed by Dennis’s artistic, scientific, and philosophical ruminations on the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.

To inaugurate the public program series, theorists Denise Ferreira da Silva and J. Kameron Carter will deliver a pair of lectures that delve into the irruptive, world-unmaking capacities of Blackness, as figured in the unruly grammars of Black poetics.

Da Silva’s presentation, “More-than-Perfect – Black T/Senses of Future: Fo(u)r Anticolonial Gestures,” utilizes language and its structuring syntaxes to consider the metaphysical violence of linear temporality, its political-economic reification in global capitalist infrastructures of extraction and expropriation, and Blackness’s potential to disarm and unravel the determining logics that cohere these planetary colonial structures.

Carter’s lecture, “Oswald’s Swerve,” situates Dennis’s art practice within what he calls “the aesthetics of the black radical tradition.” Proposing Blackness as activating an “alternative, anarchic imagination of matter,” Carter considers a “poetics of the swerve” reflected in Dennis’s work, religion and culture scholar Charles Long’s meditations on mathopoetics, and Roman poet Lucretius’s account of matter as non-atomistic, infinitely indeterminate, anti-imperial movement.

Da Silva and Carter will have a brief discussion and a Q&A with the audience following their respective presentations.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Black Earth Study Club is organized by KJ Abudu, Assistant Curator, Public Programs and Residencies.

Denise Ferreira da Silva holds the Samuel Rudin Chair Professor in Humanities in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and co-Director of the Critical Racial & Anti-Colonial Study Collaboratory at New York University. As an academic, her publications include Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013), and Unpayable Debt (2022). In 2023, she held the International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the Universté de Paris 8. Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain, 4Waters-Deep Implicancy, Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum, and Ancestral Clouds/Ancestral Claims (with Arjuna Neuman) and the performance and visual art practices Poethical Readings, Sensing Salon, and Reading with Echo (with Valentina Desideri). She has exhibited, performed, and lectured at the Centre Pompidou, Whitechapel Gallery, Guggenheim, MASP, Galway Arts Centre, Extracity Kunsthalle Antwerp, MACBA, Munch Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, and the São Paulo, Berlin and Venice Biennials.

J. Kameron Carter is Professor of African American Studies, Comparative Religion, and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Carter engages questions of race and ecology through religion and literature. He is the author of Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008), editor of Religion and the Futures of Blackness (2013), and editor of The Matter of Black Religion (2021), and author of The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song (2023). His next book, Whiteness: An American Lamentation, is in the final stages of preparation and will appear with Yale University Press.

Image: Nolan Oswald Dennis, no conciliation is possible (working diagram), 2018-ongoing.