Kandis Williams
Fusing Ethics and Aesthetics, the Work of CASSANDRA Press
11 July 19, 9 pm
Venue: Pogo Bar
In English
RSVP to pogobar@kw-berlin.de
Collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, shared with the Library of Congress
Fusing Ethics and Aesthetics, the work of CASSANDRA Press: Collage, knowledge anti-production, and messy dissemination, or: What exactly do we owe to future generations?
Los Angeles-based artist Kandis Williams, whose work explores racial-nationalism, authority, and eroticism, hosts an evening of drinking and talking about slavery at Pogo Bar. Together with Taylor Doran and Jordan Nassar, Williams founded CASSANDRA Press in 2016, a publishing project producinglo-fi political and philosophical texts, flyers, posters, pamphlets, and readers. The press aims to spread ideas, share perspectives, promote dialogue, and inspire further and wider-spread political and social activism.
CASSANDRA investigates modes of piracy and bootlegging as interventions on the subject(s) lost, retrieved, and obsolesced in the process of aestheticization and politicalization. Pointing to the artist’s role as both philosopher and propagandist – a line of both defense and indulgence in capitalist extractivism – Williams will speak to the analytic possibilities of CASSANDRA and archival extractivism, and the interaction of new archives, erased archives, and oral or aesthetic histories as they meet a discourse designed to instantaneously and continuously claim, commodify, and outstrip them. Williams will give a talk on the potential fusion of aesthetics and ethics through creative mining of the academy, the library and myth to engender holistic ascriptions of meaning, as well as the limitations of those opportunities within violent institutional models of exclusion.
The talk will launch several new readers produced for the occasion: CASSANDRA’s reader on law, the unconscious and the metaphysical, the reader on porn and power in California, the reader on the white savior complex, the reader on Black and Silverscreen: film, colorism and carceral politics, the reader on essentialism and disorder, and the reader on the libidinal economy, will all be available in first edition at KW.