READER
Reading/Feeling
Reading/Feeling centres around the notion of affect, a term
that delineates a field where the personal and the political meet through
sensory movements between bodies. Affect, as a pre-emotional experience,
constitutes the social and economic relationships that make up the fabric of
society. Reading/Feeling considers
the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice, with a selection of
texts by theoreticians, artists and curators that were read in If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of
Your Revolution’s reading groups in Amsterdam, Sheffield and Toronto for
the past two years, as part of the programme Edition IV – Affect (2010 -2012).
Reading/Feeling includes text by: Sara Ahmed, Rhea Anastas,
Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Lone Bertelsen, Gregg Bordowitz, Judith Butler,
Jeremiah Day, Gilles Deleuze, Lucien Febvre, Simone Forti, Adam Frank, Andrea
Fraser, Félix Guattari, Sharon Hayes, Michael Hardt, Brian Holmes, Jutta
Koether, Glenn Ligon, Biran Massumi, Helen Molesworth, Andrew Murphie, Sina
Najafi, George Orwell, Emily Roysdon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, David Serlin,
Baruch Spinoza, Susan Sontag, Jan Verwoert, Mary Zouranzi, plus newly
commissioned essays from Tanja Baudoin, Emma Cocker, and Jacob Korczynski,
contributions by reading group members and artist pages by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy.
Edited by
Tanja Baudoin, Frédérique Bergholtz and Vivien Ziherl. ISBN 978-90-814471-0-2
Price 20
Euro. Order via info@ificantdance.org
Background to the publication
and future development
From Affect to Appropriation
Over
the past two years the notion of affect formed a shared interest that bound
together If I Can’t Dance’s programme of New Commissions and Performance in
Residence projects. In reading groups and workshops IICD studied theories of affect as a pre-emotional state
that is formative to our relationships with others as it moves between bodies
and gives shape to subjectivities. This impetus has since extended into
readings that move via theories of affect to an understanding of appropriation
as an act of dedication. In the next two years, IICD will explore the productive
friction between the notion of ‘making something your own’ as a potential
subversive strategy and the inverse availability to be transformed by the
objects we would attempt to possess. IICD will depart from discussions of
appropriation as they first arose around artistic practices in the 1980s as
part of a discourse that questioned the modernist hegemony of originality and
autonomy in art. These were firmly rooted in a Marxist critique of
appropriation in resistance to capitalist dispossession. IICD strive to
interrogate the connections between that moment in the 1980s and today, and to
think about appropriation in relation to current artistic practice, more
specifically performance practice.