Public Knowledge: Meeting Grounds: Essay as Event

16 Mar 2024 2-6pm

Overview

A gathering with contributions from Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Ima-Abasi Okon, Brian Dillon and Alex Balgiu, composed by Paul Bailey.

The Meeting Grounds series invites investigation, and experimentation, with the visual essay as a verb (essaying), an event (a gathering) and as a social form for collective reasoning.

‘If we stop thinking about the form of the essay as the form of a thing, the form of an object, and reconsider it as the form of an activity or action (as in a dancer’s form, or the form of a golfer’s swing, or the form of a tennis player’s backhand), we can locate a consistent and unbroken line of agreement about the nature and the form of the essay to contemporary essayists and theorists; the essay is kineticism incarnate—the embodiment of perpetual mobility, motion and movement’.
- Paul Heilker, The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form (1996).

For this edition at the Camden Art Centre, we will explore essayistic strategies that bring the temporalities, materialities and opacities of language into view, and consider how they might be put to use across contemporary practices of graphic design, literature, performance and installation. 

Guided by a series of propositions shared by our contributors, guests are invited to join the gathering as participants in a rehearsal for an essay yet-to-come. 

‘It is the essayist’s job to gather up the shards and map them where they are, to find patterns out there or make one … about the disconnections and mysteries’. – Rebecca Solnit, The Best American Essays (2019).
 

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