2025-2026 FROM CONFLUENCE TO CONFLUENCE ~ Sarah Lewis-Cappellari's seminar: Unsettling Representation: On the Limits of Critique, Towards a Deciphering Practice
SEMINAR: April 17, 18 & 19, 2026
Deadening
Image: Ligia Lewis, A Plot/A Scandal, 2022.
This seminar turns to the spectacle of black death as the sustaining operation of modernity’s aesthetic order, asking how the works gathered here might propose the end of a world grounded in such logics. In Ligia Lewis’s choreographies, deadening takes the form of what David Marriott might call corpsing; a playing dead that folds humor into refusal, deranging the demand to perform legibility and exposing the absurdity of racial subjection’s terms. Read alongside W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet,” where the world’s collapse opens the possibility of sensing otherwise, and Saidiya Hartman’s meditations on the afterlife of slavery, these works propose deadening as an aesthetic procedure that loosens the hold of form itself. In this sense, following Denise Ferreira da Silva’s proposition of “the end of this world as we know it,” deadening makes perceptible what might persist beyond a world that racial violence has built.
“An End to ‘This’World” Denise Ferreira Da Silva Interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin
Stakemeier, 19 April 2019. www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/.
David Marriott, “Corpsing; or, the matter of Black Life.” Cultural Critique, vol. 94, 2016, p.
32-64, https://doi.org/10.5749/culturalcritique.94.2016.003
Ligia Lewis. A Plot/A Scandal. Performance, 2022.
Ligia Lewis and Moritz Freudenberg. Still Not Still (Scenes for Camera). 2021.
Sarah Lewis-Cappellari and Ligia Lewis. “In Conversation for A Plot/A Scandal.” Walker Art Center Magazine, 2022. https://walkerart.org/magazine/sarah-lewis-cappellari-in-conversation-with-ligia-lewis/.
W. E. B. Du Bois. “The Comet.” In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 253-273. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.
Saidiya Hartman. “The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance.” BOMB Magazine, June 5, 2020. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2020/06/05/the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american-romance/.
Case study: Open Casket by Dana Schutz at the Whitney Binneal
Hannah Black, ‘The Painting Must Go’: Hannah Black Pens Open Letter to the Whitney About Controversial Biennial Work
Coco Fusco, Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image ofEmmett Till
Jared Sexton, “The Rage: Some Closing Comments on ‘Open Casket’’’ Contemporary, 2017. https://contemptorary.org/the-rage-sexton/.
Evening of the 16th:
screening: Ligia Lewis. A Plot/A Scandal. Performance, 2022 and Still Not Still (Scenes for Camera). 2021.
Day 1:
Morning:
Discussion of A Plot/A Scandal, and “Sense of Things” Jackson
Afternoon:
Check in on master thesis and morning discussion continued
Day 2:
Morning:
case study: Open Casket by Dana Schutz at the Whitney Biennial
and discussion
Afternoon:
DuBois and Hartman text
Day 3:
Morning:
Da Silva interview
Afternoon:
walk and concluding discussion
SEMINAR: March 13, 14 & 15, 2026
As one of the interventions in this seminar, reorienting attends to how long-inherited Western traditions that hierarchize the senses might be unsettled by shifting attention to taste and other registers cast as minor or excessive. Guided by Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, we will consider how orientations shape the sensory and spatial organization of the world, what is brought near, what remains out of reach. Stemming from my research on sugar, we will ask how the taste of and for sweetness is (re)produced through racializing acts of consumption, what I call acts of racial tasting. Reading theoretical and cultural texts we will explore how reorienting sense-abilities might open other modes of relation, feeling, and attention.
Arnold Berleant, “The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, no. 2 (1964): 185–192.
Dixa Ramirez “Caves, Octaves, More Reality”. A talk at Brown University in 2025.
Sara Ahmed. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 543–574.
Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, “Racial Tasting: On the Performance of Sugar” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenshaften, Volume 1, Spring 2022.
Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, “Sense of Things.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 2, 2016, pp. 1– 48.
James Baldwin. Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. Directed by Terence Dixon, 1970.
Day 1:
Morning: Midterm evaluations
Afternoon: Walk and presentation of diffractive writing exercise
Day 2:
Morning: Excerpts from the assigned texts, artistic examples of reorientation, and discussion.
Afternoon: Excerpts from the assigned texts, artistic examples of reorientation, and discussion.
Day 3:
Morning: Excerpts from the assigned texts, artistic examples of reorientation, and discussion.
Afternoon screening: James Baldwin. Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris.
SEMINAR: January 17, 18 & 19, 2026
Looting // Decolonizing
Image: Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), Renzo Martens, and Hicham Khalidi, The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred, Dutch Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Installation view.
To think with looting is to attend to the fractures in the distribution of value and property that secure colonial aesthetics; the logics through which possession and preservation are made to appear natural and desirable. Looted objects populate Western museums, their theft recast as heritage and care, while acts of seizure by the racialized and dispossessed are rendered as criminal excess. As Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott suggest, looting exceeds the frame of violence or disorder; it names a refusal of the property form itself. Evan Calder Williams likewise reads looting as the exposure of possession’s fragility, a redistribution enacted from below. In Bob Marley’s Burnin’ and Lootin’, this refusal takes on musical form, linking the defense of property to the policing of Black life. Looting, therefore, might be thought to operate as a counter-aesthetic of disruption rather than restoration, an act that unsettles the sanctity of ownership and interrupts the aesthetic order through which colonial modernity secures itself.
From this vantage, decolonizing emerges less as a program of recovery than as a demand to recompose the very grounds of representation and intelligibility. To move from critique to transformation is to reckon with the institutional and political-aesthetic scales at which value, beauty, and belonging are organized. Bolivia’s transition to a plurinational state gestures towards the promises and perils of institutional decolonisation, where aesthetics becomes a contested site for negotiating collective futures.
Bob Marley & The Wailers. “Burnin’ and Lootin’.” On Burnin’. Island Records, 1973.
Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott. Looting. Edited by Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales, 2023.
Williams, Evan Calder. “An Open Letter to those who condemn looting.” (2011). https://azinelibrary.org/approved/open-letter-those-who-condemn-looting-evan-calder-williams-1.pdf
Mati Diop. Dahomey, 2024.
Denise Ferreira da Silva. “In the Raw.” e-flux Journal 93 (September 2018). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw/.
Claire Bishop. “Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise.” Artforum.https://www.artforum.com/events/cercle-dart-des-travailleurs-de-plantation-congolaise-2-230139/.
Case study: Pavilion of the Netherlands,Venice 2024
Elvira Espejo Ayca. “YANAK UYWAÑA: The Mutual Nurturing of the Arts.” Translated by Pablo Lafuente. Edited by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz. Vienna: transversal texts, 2023. https://transversal.at/media/espejo-en.pdf.
Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz. “Bolivia: A Debt to Beauty.” October Magazine, Vol. 181, Summer 2022. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The White West IV: Who’s Universal? HKW Podcast Episode 12 with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz: https://archiv.hkw.de/en/app/mediathek/audio/90765
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” in The documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich: Prestel 2017).
Day 1:
Morning:
Review and continuation of Confluence #2 Re/De/Composition
Afternoon:
excerpts of assigned texts and discussion
Evening
screening Dahomey, Mati Diop, 2024
Day 2:
Morning:
excerpts of assigned texts and discussion
Afternoon:
excerpts of assigned texts and discussion
Day 3:
Morning:
excerpts of assigned texts and discussion
Afternoon:
discussion and diffractive writing exercise
SEMINAR: November 22 & 23, 2025
Toward a Deciphering Practice // Re/De/Composition
Image 1: Sondra Perry, Typhoon Coming On, 2018. Multi-channel video installation. Installation view.
Image 2: J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
We begin by situating Sylvia Wynter’s concept of decipherment within her broader intellectual trajectory, which moves from interrogating the coloniality of being to exposing how aesthetics functions as one of its key regulatory domains. If the category of Man naturalizes hierarchies of being, then the aesthetic—through its regimes of taste, value, and representation—secures those hierarchies at the level of perception. Decipherment, as Wynter proposes, refuses to remain within critique’s closed loop and instead practices a disobedient reading that unsettles the aesthetic order from within. Engaging Wynter alongside cultural texts, we trace how decipherment illuminates the exclusions encoded in modernity’s aesthetic grammar while also attending to the contradictions/possibilities that exceed it.
Among the many propositions that might (re)orient such a practice, we turn to re/de/composing, following Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, as an analytic that attends to the entanglement of form, matter, and raciality. Read alongside Sondra Perry’s pixelated reworking of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) in Typhoon Coming On (2018) and M. NourbeSe Philip’s juridical and linguistic fragmentation in Zong! (2008), this proposition foregrounds how aesthetic and legal forms alike secure the colonial ordering of the human. In Perry’s unstable digital surface and Philip’s disarticulation of legal testimony, re/de/composition names a refusal of closure; a lingering within the fissures of form where decomposition and recomposition are inseparable, and where the aesthetic’s hold on being and perception momentarily loosens, though never fully releases.
Saturday 22
Morning:
Discussion of how seminars will run
begin reading excerpts of assigned texts followed by discussion
Afternoon:
screening of Jay-Z, Moonlight (2018), and Spike Lee. Do the Right Thing, 1989.
Sunday 23
Morning:
presentation of second-year master’s thesis (work-in-progress)
reading excerpts of assigned texts, artistic examples of re/de/compostion and discussion
Afternoon:
screening: Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva: 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy
followed by discussion
*diffractive writing exercise
*In this seminar, we will experiment with and collectively develop a methodology of diffractive writing, exploring what diffraction implies and what such a practice might render possible. As Karen Barad reminds us, diffraction attends to the patterns of difference that make a difference, how, in other words, phenomena intra-act rather than merely reflect or oppose. In conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of fractal thinking, which conceives each part as inseparable from the whole, we will consider how thought and matter, theory and art, are already entangled. Through this approach, writing becomes a site for tracing interference and resonance across the seminar’s texts, images, and gestures; an experiment in participating with, rather than representing, the worlds we seek to think and transform.
Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, vol. 1, no. 1, Fall 1994, pp. 1–17.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. “Against Criticism: Notes on Decipherment and the Force of Things.” NHI, 71-80.
Jay-Z. Moonlight. Directed by Alan Yang, 2018.
Spike Lee. Do the Right Thing, 1989.
Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Four Theses on Aesthetics.” e-flux Journal 120 (2021). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416146/four-theses-on-aesthetics/.
Sondra Perry. Typhoon Coming On, 2018.
M. NourbeSe Philip. Zong! Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva. 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, 2018.