June 17, 2023 – Symposium

Amt 45 i: Talks

A day of talks by Zoé Samudzi, Alexander G. Weheliye, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Saidiya Hartman, whose work and thought have been formative to Cameron Rowland's exhibition Amt 45 i.

Zoé Samudzi
Land and/as Reparations: Sovereignty at Stake
2 pm-3:30 pm

Alexander G. Weheliye
SchwarzSein: Blackness Beyond the Human
4:00 pm-5:30 pm

Denise Ferreira da Silva and Saidiya Hartman
Racial Calculus
7 pm-8:30 pm

All talks will take place at Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, in the Aula.

Zoé Samudzi is the incoming Charles E. Scheid Visiting Assistant Professor in Genocide Studies and Genocide Prevention at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. She is also a Research Associate with the Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Class at the University of Johannesburg. Samudzi’s research engages race-making and anti-blackness, the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, political memory, and visuality. As a writer and critic, Samudzi is an associate editor at Parapraxis Magazine, and her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Architectural Review, The New Inquiry, Funambulist, and elsewhere.

Alexander G. Weheliye is Malcom S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Weheliye’s areas of research include critical theory, Black literature and culture as well as Black Life/Schwarz-Sein, which establishes Blackness as an ontology of ungendering. Weheliye is the author of, among other publications, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014) and the forthcoming Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is currently Professor of the Institute for Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Adjunct Professor at Monash University’s Art, Design, & Architecture, Melbourne; and holds the 2023 International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy at Université de Paris 8, Paris. As an academic and artist, she studies the political architecture of the global present. Her publications include, among others, Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and Unpayable Debt (2022). She has exhibited and lectured at institutions such as the Singapore Biennale (2022), MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997, 2022); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007); and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019). Hartman received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and University Professor at Columbia University.

Organized by Cameron Rowland
Supported by the Städelschule Student Union and financially possible through Cameron Rowland Studio, New York

Image Credit: Cameron Rowland