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<p>Hellos... Here's information on two upcoming events this month.</p>
<p>In collaboration with <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/commons-organising-values-equalities-and-resilience">COVER,
the commons research centre</a><br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.essex.ac.uk/events/2026/06/17/elements-of-the-revolution">Elements
of the Revolution: The International Constructivists and the
Prehistory of Artistic Research</a><br>
Tobias Dias, Aarhus University<br>
Wednesday 17th June @ 12PM UK Time, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/94138698095">Online</a> <br>
<br>
<img moz-do-not-send="false"
src="cid:part1.N6A0i9mt.f3j1kvuz@gmail.com" alt="" width="800"
height="638"></p>
<p>This seminar takes the form of an open peer review and discussion
of a forthcoming book to be published, <i>Elements of the
Revolution: The International Constructivists and the Prehistory
of Artistic Research</i>, which offers a critical history of the
“research program” and political epistemology that emerged in the
largely forgotten milieu of the International Constructivists in
the early 1920s. It provides a novel narrative and theoretical
elaboration of this transnational milieu, which included artists
such as Hans Richter, Raoul Hausmann, El Lissitzky, and László
Moholy-Nagy. It traces the dialectics of deskilling and reskilling
that underpinned their artistic practice, thinking, and
subjectivity by considering their engagement with technoscientific
and epistemic issues of the interwar period.<br>
<br>
Examining the artist’s attention to what they called “elements of
the world,” such as rhythm, light, movement, and gesture, whether
manifested in geometric lines and spirals on the pictorial
surface, photographic abstractions, or the living images of
cinema, the book tracks and conceptualizes how such an
elementarism functioned as a revolutionary grammar in the
“European civil war” from the late 1910s to the late 1930s. This
elementarism, the book suggests, could be understood as a critique
of dialectical materialism and other prominent scientific strands
of the socialist and communist movement, and thus essentially as a
“self-critique of the revolution” in the sense of an ambiguous and
contradictory examination of what a revolutionary process would
entail. Based on archival research and detailed historical and
theoretical analysis, the book thus unearths a revolutionary form
of artistic research that both sheds new critical light on key
figures of the “historical avant-gardes” as well as on
contemporary discussions on “artistic research” and “knowledge
production.”<br>
<br>
<b>Bio:</b> Tobias Dias is a writer, critic, editor, and educator
based in Aarhus, Denmark. His research concerns the history and
theory of the avant-gardes and contemporary art, the history and
theory of aesthetics, and the politics of knowledge in the 20th
and 21st centuries. He is currently employed as a postdoctoral
researcher at Aarhus University and as a Lecturer at Jutland Art
Academy. His work has been published in journals and magazines
such as <i>e-flux</i>, <i>Art-Agenda</i>, <i>Texte zur Kunst</i>,
<i>Periskop</i>, <i>ARKEN Bulletin</i>, <i>Passepartout</i>, and
<i>kritische berichte</i>. He has written the afterword to the
first Danish translation of Theodor W. Adorno’s <i>Ästhetische
Theorie</i>. He’s the editor and co-author of <i>En anden
økologi: Anticapitalistisk håndbog</i> (A Different Ecology:
Anticapitalist Handbook).</p>
<p>If you would like to receive a copy of the draft manuscript to
read before the event email saying so.</p>
<p align="center">§§§</p>
<p align="left"><b>Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans
Worldmaking</b><br>
29/6 @ 7PM UK Time, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/93212366688">Online</a><br>
Ferdiansyah Thajib<br>
</p>
<p align="left"><img moz-do-not-send="false"
src="cid:part2.RiRNczte.usL0Q6z0@gmail.com" alt="" width="454"
height="675"></p>
<p align="left"><br>
For this event, we are joined by Ferdiansyah Thajib to discuss his
new book <i>Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans
Worldmaking in Indonesia</i>. Drawing on ethnographic research
across Indonesia, the book explores how queer and trans Muslims
navigate the complex intersections of faith, desire, gender, and
sexuality in a social context where these identities are often
cast as fundamentally incompatible.<br>
<br>
Rather than focusing solely on narratives of exclusion or
resistance, Thajib examines the everyday practices through which
people endure, improvise, and create livable worlds amidst
conditions of marginalization. Some distance themselves from
religious institutions, others seek to transform them from within,
while many continue to inhabit the tensions and ambivalences
between faith and identity. Through these experiences, the book
offers a rich account of how queer and trans Muslim subjectivities
are forged through hope, exhaustion, piety, failure, and
collective worldmaking.<br>
<br>
Join us for a discussion of religion, sexuality, affect,
endurance, and the possibilities of creating forms of life that
exceed the limits imposed by dominant social norms. Event will be
recorded for an episode of the Minor Compositions podcast.<br>
<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.minorcompositions.info">https://www.minorcompositions.info</a>
Linktree of all our stuff: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions">https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions</a></pre>
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