Clockwise from top left; Dr. Sandra Ruiz, Dr. Hypatia Vourloumis and Dr. Laura Harris
9 words. 9 parts. One formless formation of dirty, disobedient, deviant methodology crafted into vignettes to resonate, experiment, and dare to imagine “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.”
On October 20th we convened, celebrated, and contemplated the potentiality of revolution and political thought as we unpacked PS alums, Dr. Sandra Ruiz and Dr. Hypatia Vourloumis’s latest book, Formless Formations: Vignettes For the End of the World. Moderated by Dr. Laura Harris and co-sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies and Art and Public Policy, the lively discussion, experimental format, and blurring of mediums captured the work’s episodic resonances of performative and aesthetic practices to address current and future social organizing.
1. Momentum: “the impetus gained by a moving object”
Dr. Harris, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Art and Public Policy began by introducing Dr. Sandra Ruiz and Dr. Hypatia Vourloumis. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance, co-book series editor of Minoritarian Aesthetics, co-organizer of the Brown Theatre Collective, and creator of La Estación Gallery. She is currently working on a book of poetry called The Edge of Depth and teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Vourloumis teaches at the Dutch Art Institute and has a forthcoming book on the performance and politics of Indonesian noise and paralanguage.
After finishing introductions, Ruiz briefly explained the book before diving into text and media to supplement the material. Described as a “jam-session,” Ruiz and Vourloumis generated momentum, riffing off one another as they nourished us with rich, sensorial language while we, the moving objects, engaged in a concert of “deep listening in the new world disorder.”
2. Swarm: “movement in large numbers”
Virtually gathered together in disparate spaces, we watched videos of birds choreographically flock across the screen, transfixed by a greater power. Juxtaposed by a stark musical contrast of varied instruments while birds swarmed in unison, we considered how the animals shift forms and shapes by coordinating with those in proximity to them. All this is in conjunction with the truth that as with the birds, the musical accompaniment produced harmony through separate instruments conjoined into one collective. We breathed life into this paradox as Ruiz explained, “the respiration will recognize dispossession...refusing their own dialectic.” The non-linearity acted as a discomforting lullaby to illuminate the “meaning of flight and fade sentiments the promise of multiverse respiration.”
3. Vibration: “a person's emotional state, the atmosphere of a place, or the associations of an object, as communicated to and felt by others/an oscillation of the parts of a fluid or an elastic solid whose equilibrium has been disturbed, or of an electromagnetic wave.”
How do we hear? How do we tune in and out? How do we listen? We listened to excerpts surrounding this concept followed by a collective reading where we embraced the resonant dissonance of organized disorder that comes from oscillating spaces whose equilibriums are disrupted into a technological frenzy.
4. Ensemble: “a group of performers viewed together/a group of items viewed as a whole rather than individually.”
After going through a selection of excerpts, we welcomed a discussion led by Harris. She began beckoning the question, “How do you speak to militant love?” Ruiz and Vourloumis acted as one as they examined the ability to create work that crosses content to act as a generative contradiction. Rather than abandoning form altogether, they explored how the form is constantly in motion as with physics and capital and is thereby always resisting definition. To recognize this offers linguistic opportunities to break and remake worlds and insight into social and political organizing through the framework of an ensemble. This synergistic impulse empowers us to breathe in unison and act as “an ideological imprint or social composition.”
5. Orchestra: “A group of musicians who play together on a variety of instruments”
Harris proceeded by asking why? Ruiz and Vourloumis responded by expounding on the hierarchy of knowledge production and how the protocols of critical reading and writing need to be critically evaluated. They explained that the lack of these questions and their desire to rectify it served as an impetus for the work. All the while they examined how in the making of the piece they acted as a unit, destroying boundaries between one another to become one unified sound. In doing so they explained, “assembling bodies, feelings, and fists is where the swarm and ensemble multiply the score through orchestration.”
6. Dimension: “A form of shape/a measurable extent of some kind”
The loose conversational format organically pushed the discussion into a question of dimension. What do we have the capacity to perceive? What do we have the capacity to receive? A form or shape made formless calls the reader to act and investigate whether borders have edges and how definitions and etymology can inform and (de)form a text.
7. Addition: “the action of adding”
In a moment of pause, Harris supplemented the conversation by asking how Ruiz and Vourloumis are exploring solidarity aesthetically and politically on a sensorial level, to which they responded “What is difference without separability?” This led them to assert that the addition of the aesthetic is really an acknowledgment of how politics and aesthetics are always entangled despite not always being treated as such.
8. Magic: “effective in producing results, supernatural”
We were then ushered into the magic. “A striking incantation or a synergistic impulse between the known and unknown elemental magic is like a social democracy gliding across enchantment.” In this space, we are asked to question every day in an ensemble liberated from form. Opening up the conversation to audience members, we experienced the magic of the collective as individuals asked about the performative structures of control, the radical juxtaposition of the ephemeral across senses, how deviant methodologies inform political urgency, and what academics can learn from solidarity without resonance.
9. Responder: “a person who reacts to something”
All this concluded with a response, with the response, with answers, with unanswerables. An encouragement to write for and against what you love, they concluded by empowering the audience to dream outside presumptions and form and by doing so enter into the radical space of potentiality.
Story by Leila Mire.