RELATIONAL FORMS
Course convened by Anousheh Kehar
Thinking with the theme of contextualization at the IZK this semester, the course WHEN THE RIVER DIES, MY DEAREST LISTEN! INFRA/STRUCTURES AND ANTI-IMPERIAL MODELS, proposes a study of the socio-spatial relations of rivers and coasts. Looking at the Sindhu/Indus River, Wanawna/Santa Ana River, southern coast of California, and coast of Gaza the course asks to critically analyze the structures forming and reforming specific conditions.
On the one hand, there is certainly an aspect of detrimental political-economic structures reformulated, maintained, and reinforced (in space and time) that violently deteriorate places and endanger ecosystems and people. These may be tangible, visible, or obscured. At times, far beneath the surface, rested on the floor of the river, below the foundations of new construction. At times there is evidence (as per Western notions and standards). Other times, traces, fragments, discarded, left outside the peripheries of Western knowledges. On the other hand people intervene, remaking and reproducing life differently, for “life to flourish.” Establishing and circulating, reestablishing and recirculating knowledges by operationalizing tools otherwise. Reproducing practices and movements.
Through a study of artistic works and pivotal texts, the course encourages thinking across practices to understand the production of space via infra/structures to do with water. Asking what type of social, economic, environmental, cultural, spatial relations and their nuances make a given place. Such analyses are understood as the basis (and practice) for articulating relevant transformations toward social-environmental justice. Within the scope of the semester, students will be encouraged to develop their own analyses through discussions, drawings, and writings.