Jerusalem, Hansen Compound, June 19, 2014 at 18:30
Refreshments and a tour of Hansen House will be offered starting at 17:30
Exhausted Geographies are those that cannot sustain the claims they have been mobilized for – territorial, national, regional, ethnic, cultural, economic, and ideological. In particular I am interested in how a geography in crisis, whether political, economic or climactic — can or cannot sustain and its identity. And so I have been thinking of exhaustion in relation to political conflict, not a mode of opting out and withdrawing, but as one of recognizing the limits of a logic that has dominated that conflict for most of its duration. When ‘place’ has been exceedingly mobilized for claims of belonging and legitimacy, it can turn to exhaustion rather than to negation. I suspect that this exhaustion takes the form of an act of treason, in Deleuze’s sense of treachery, a refusal to support and sustain that which demands it of you, because it claims to support and sustain you. For in the realm of living out long term political conflict, treason and exhaustion are not unrelated to one another. The exhausted geographies of which I speak are the material manifestations of what I am trying to describe: territorialities and territorial claims that cannot sustain themselves.
Irit Rogoff is a writer, curator, and organizer working at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, and emergent political manifestations. She is Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London University where she heads the PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge program, the MA in Global Arts program and the new Geo-Cultures Research Center. Rogoff has written extensively on geography, globalization, and contemporary participatory practices in the expanded field of art. A collection of recent essays, Unbounded—Limits’ Possibilities, is published in 2014 with e-flux journal/ Sternberg and her new book, Looking Away—Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities is forthcoming. Rogoff is also co-founder of freethought, a loose collaborative platform for research, pedagogy, and production based in London, where she lives and works
