Formless Formation: A Conversation with Authors Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis

Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World is an experimental project conceived and co-authored by performance theorists—both NYU Performance Studies graduates—working in critical aesthetics and political thought. The book is an insurgent revolt, walking side by side with plural and planetary anticolonial forces organizing against debt, expropriative extractive capital, environmental catastrophe, and the militarized policing of people and borders. It is in direct conversation with all Indigenous, Black, Brown, ecological, feminist, queer, diasporic movements and struggles countering capitalist predatory formations across time and space. Through shared resonances across differing aesthetic-life-worlds and solidarities that bypass the nation-state, Ruiz and Vourloumis bring to the forefront performative and aesthetic practices and methods that address current and future social organizing.

Bios:

Sandra Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (2019); co-author with Hypatia Vourloumis of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World (2021); co-book series editor of Minoritarian Aesthetics (NYU); co-organizer of The Brown Theatre Collective; and creator of La Estación Gallery. She's currently working on a book of poetry called The Edge of Depth.

Hypatia Vourloumis is co-author with Sandra Ruiz of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World (Minor Compositions, 2021) and of a forthcoming book on the performance and politics of Indonesian noise and paralanguage. She teaches at the Dutch Art Institute.

This event is cosponsored by the Department of Performance Studies and Art & Public Policy.