The book Formless Formation - Vignettes for the End of this World, co-authored by Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis (beloved and pivotal member of DAI's faculty since 2016) is an experimental project, an insurgent revolt, walking side by side with plural and planetary anticolonial forces organizing against debt, expropriative extractive capital, environmental catastrophe, and the militarized policing of people and borders. We couldn't be more thrilled then to share this news with all the students, alumni and all the DAI community past and present as ( in Hypatia's words) "they are such a huge inspirational and material part of the formless formation!"
Formless Formation is an experimental project conceived and co-authored by two performance theorists working in critical aesthetics and political thought. The book is an insurgent revolt, walking side by side with plural and planetary anticolonial forces organizing against debt, expropriative extractive capital, environmental catastrophe, and the militarized policing of people and borders. It is in direct conversation with all Indigenous, Black, Brown, ecological, feminist, queer, diasporic movements and struggles countering capitalist predatory formations across time and space. Through shared resonances across differing aesthetic-life-worlds and solidarities that bypass the nation-state, Ruiz and Vourloumis bring to the forefront performative and aesthetic practices and methods that address current and future social organizing.
“For artists, theorists, revolutionaries, activists and weirdos who are already performing aesthetic-life-worlds and reaching for the beyond in the here and now, Formless Formation is a must read! Ruiz and Vourloumis witness, celebrate, and conjoin without taking and without force. This double negation as skillful artistry extends greater dreaming space to all of us who are already so over it and also in the known unknown by way of radical praxis. This prescient co-authorship with its expansive archive and out of this world word couplings, associations, and relations will make you question the revolutionary potential of anything attributed to a single name. Following their sound, there is a trustworthy “we” at work and play that moves us to a more radical radicality. This is a capacious analysis beyond interdisciplinarity. It is how we fly, zoom, read, and dance to believe in belief yet again, which makes the inventive and experimental, a collective ours.” – Ruth Nicole Brown
“Formless Formation manages to be many things at once: theory, manifesto, astute analysis, and sharp critique. Working from a sprawling archive of sources across disciplines, Ruiz and Vourloumis mobilize a potent set of keywords in order to pinpoint and pry loose new modes of aesthetic and political engagement. As current as your twitter feed and as musical as your life, this exhilarating text traces how pivotal queer and BIPOC artists and activists sonify resistance, how resonant forms emerge from and within the noise, and how contemporary performance catalyzes other worlds.” – Vijay Iyer
Sandra Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (NYU Press, 2019).
Hypatia Vourloumis is the author of the forthcoming Paralinguistic Insurgencies: Indonesian Noise.
The authors are alumni of the performance studies department at NYU, where they met as students.
Formless Formation is available direct from Minor Compositions now for the special price of £10.
188 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 trim)
UK: £17 / US: $23
ISBN 978-1-57027-379-7