19:00-22:00 hrs, Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Lange Nieuwstraat 7, Utrecht

PLEASE NOTE: ON Friday November 7 the  DAI-week ends at 17:00

Casco — Office for Art, Design and Theory warmly welcomes you to a very special day with Leela Gandhi on 7 November. In a lecture and Open Seminar Gandhi will offer an alternative reading of anti-colonial struggle, constructing the history of transnational lifestyles, and modes of self-work.

She draws on material from her two recent books The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955 (2014) and Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin de Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (2006). In particular, she meditates on the poetic encounter between the Indian anti-colonial leader M.K. Gandhi and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, in the troubled times of the early twentieth century in India. Through this process Leela Gandhi sheds light on what she terms "ethics of imperfection" and self-work, as germane to practices of radical democracy. With Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group as an official conversant.

This occasion furthers Casco's inquiry into the social and political meanings in the formation of communal habits under the heading New Habits, a larger series of Casco projects; Gandhi's involvement takes place in the framework of collaborative research with Iaspis, Stockholm and Iniva, London, entitled Practice International, funded by the European Union Culture Programme.

The Open Seminar is co-hosted with the Graduate Gender Programme (Ggep) of Utrecht University for its "Doing Gender" lecture series, under the collaborative framework of Affective Communities by Casco and Ggep.

For the Open Seminar, dinner is prepared by vegan chef and activist Mari Pitkanen. Given seating and food are limited, to reserve your place, please e-mail Ying Que at ying@cascoprojects.org.

The aforementioned publications The Common Cause (2014) and Affective Communities (2006) will be available for purchase at both events. With thanks to Utrecht-based political bookstore De Rooie Rat.

To view Leela Gandhi's lecture on the occasion of Practice International: Stockholm Assembly at Iaspis, Stockholm, please click here.

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