Shared days in Marseille – Day #3

MORE THAN THIS / Shared Residency #1

organised by L’OFFICINA
curated by Elena Biserna, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Francesca Corona
coordinated by Elena Biserna

December 12-14, 2018
Friche la Belle de Mai
41 rue Jobin, 13003 Marseille

Day #3
Elena Biserna, Daniel Blanga-Gubbay

More Than This: Fiction as a Political Tool

∇ Talk, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Introduction

Started as an article commissioned by Mada (Cairo), this introduction has the format of an expanded–lecture, which merges theory and Youtube video-clips to disclose the use of fiction as a political tool. Exploring the heritage of the xenofeminist research of Laboria Cuboniks, this session discloses the use of fiction in contemporary political and artistic practices as a tool fighting simplification and the projection of assigned identities in colonial landscapes, and a gesture reclaiming a complexity beyond the understanding of the other. Referencing the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan (The Freedom of Speech) of the previous day, this introduction explores the strategies of hyper-camouflage to open a reflection on fiction and revolt, and its use in recent works of Arab and Afro-futurism: no longer a revolt inside the margins of fiction, but fiction as a form of revolt.

∇ Presentation of the practices and discussion about the projects of the MTT’s artists

∇ Reading session, Edouard Glissant, For Opacity.
Theorized by the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, opacity can be understood as an incalculable alterity that is at once the relational ontology of the world, an ethical demand, a form of political legitimation, and a poetics. This final reading session goes through the passages of Glissant, and his presences in some sequences of the film One World in Relation from Malian filmwriter Manthia Diawara.