CANCELED: DAY 1: STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE

THE COLOUR OF SOUND

When we tell you this guitar sounds like cinnamon and that horn plays in scarlet, when we say that piano is climbing our backs, and that drum has us smelling butter, don’t tell us we’re all mixed up. Mix up with us.

Mix us don’t fix us. We’re not broken even though we fall to pieces when we hear that song, even though that dread beat deranges our arrangements. Don’t fix us with that stare. Don’t write down what we said so that it might be used against us. Use us against us til like Bill Withers says you use us up.

Our friend Fred Moten says synaesthesia is the socialization of the senses. And look how we came out. We came out in the music. It turns out music is not a representation of society or example of society then, now, or later. Music is the society. It’s the secret society, the anti-social society, the high-low society. It’s the mixed-up society that won’t be straightened out, that kinky, matty, all trapped up in each other society.

Marx says that socialization is theorization. That’s what he is saying in Private Property and Communism – that until one is the other, we are going to suffer. And we do suffer, in the music, so we move, we step, we sway til one is the other. Music is the theory of no theory, the highest theory of all, communism, if communism were black.

But we don’t suffer to get better, to get fixed, to get cured. We suffer to get into it. To help each other get into it, which is to say to get mixed up in all our black colours so the scent of them and the sound of them and the touch of all those black colours is what we feel, and feel is what we are.

On this day we will play, talk, joke, and weep for our music because it’s colour is so beautiful. Like James Brown says between saying it: we can’t stand ourselves when you touch us with the music. So we stand in for each other, we stand with each other, and we stand up to fall in, down past each, past other. That’s our theory, that’s our thing.

On 14 January 2020 at 5:15am, Sheriff’s Deputies of Alameida County Oakland, including a full tactical unit in military gear, an armoured vehicle, and a robot, evicted four black mothers and their children from a derelict house in West Oakland the women had occupied and fixed up. The house is owned by a corporation called Wedgewood Properties, which speculates on thousands of properties in black, Latinx and poor neighbourhoods in the United States. Three of the mothers were arrested: Tolani King, Jesse Turner, and Misty Cross, all members of Moms for Housing. A community spokesman for the women said there was no resistance from the mothers. But the tactical unit, the robot, and the armoured vehicle were there because there was total resistance. That’s the thing.

So listen up!

With sessions by Fumi Okiji & Ronald Rose-Antoinette, Eddie George & Dhanveer Singh Brar, Nisrine Chaer & MamaKil.

ABOUT STEFANO HARNEY

Stefano Harney is the co-author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (2013) and the forthcoming All Incomplete (2020), both from Autonomedia/Minor Compositions. He is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. Together with Tonika Sealy Thompson he runs Ground Provisions, a reading residency. He is also co-founder of School for Study, a collective of teachers in higher education experimenting with ensemble teaching. Stefano has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an AB from Harvard University.

ABOUT STUDIUM GENERALE 2019-2020

Studium Generale Rietveld 2019—2020 focuses on histories, politics, and perceptions of colour in the creation and understanding aesthetic forms, social structures, and embodied experiences. Colour structures our daily life and our actions, our relationships with others and the spaces in which we live. Within different historical and cultural contexts, however, colours have very different symbolic, psychological, material, and socio-political meanings. Relating (to) Colour wants to see colour in art, science, technology, and life beyond the purely symbolic and aesthetic and not as self-evident or universal, but as a physical, material, cultural, and political phenomenon. We try to understand colour not only as visual, sensual, or textual but especially as a lived experience and relational concept that creates affect and agency.

Guest curators: Stefano Harney, Patricia Pisters, Ola Hassanain & Casco Art Institute, Taka Taka.

More information and a detailed program online soon.

Website Relating (to) Colour: https://relatingtocolour.rietveldacademie.nl