Chandra and Stephanie have organized a roundtable related to our collective work last year on leisure and pleasure for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present conference “Not a Luxury,” in New York on October 17. Other panelists include multidisciplinary artist Lorena Molina (San Francisco State University) and anthropologist and fashion studies scholar Christina H. Moon (Parsons the New School for Design). Here is the panel description:
affording slow methods
This panel will discuss the affordances of slow methods across art practice, anthropology, and the environmental humanities. As artists, curators, and scholars, we are keen to explore how we might think differently about framing knowledge production and methodologies alongside ideas of slowness. We recognize the ways in which slowness is tied to temporality and space, and how racialized others have practiced strategies of resistance against structures of white temporality, which are bound up with racial capitalism and neoliberalism. These artistic and creative practices pose critical questions about how methods of slowness could be used to unsettle dominant ideas about temporality and knowing. Moving against dominant arrangements of time allows us to tune into different kinds of tempos. We use this roundtable to imagine, in collaborative form, the ways in which we might recognize slowness in aesthetics, design, gardens, and artistic practice. What do these registers tell us about luxury and precarity? In this roundtable, we pay specific attention to the possibilities of slowing down our practice, writing, and forms of collaboration. As such, we take up the invitation of slowness to rethink our relationship with our environment, artistic practice, and research. Slowing down requires developing a politic of care that is attentive to where we come up against the limitations and restrictions of such a practice. We therefore ask: Who can afford to be slow? And how can we introduce different tempos and rhythms in our work and into the institutions in which we are embedded? In this interactive roundtable, we will engage in the praxis of slow methods, experimenting with writing prompts, notes, and sketches that invite the audience and panelists to reflect on what space for slowness, for beauty, dwelling, and pleasure look and feel like in practice.
The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present is an international, nonprofit association dedicated to discovering and articulating the aesthetic, cultural, ethical, and political identities of the contemporary arts.