Material Dreams and Nightmares: A seminar with Charles Hirschkind and Iain Chambers

Material Dreams and Nightmares | A seminar with Charles Hirschkind and Iain Chambers
Thursday 25 February, 4.00-7.00 pm + drinks Goldsmiths, RHB Small Cinema

Charles Hirschkind 'Reflections from Granada on the Place of Islam in Europe'

From the publication of Washington Irving’s Tales of Alhambra, in 1823, up through today, Granada has been a highly celebrated destination for travelers and tourists, drawn by the sublimity of its romantic oriental splendor. Yet, although the city is well known for the orientalist fantasy it puts on display for touristic consumption, here I want to consider forms of reflection that cannot be encompassed within the protocols of discourse and experience mobilized by the tourist industry, and that indeed, may challenge those protocols and the assumptions about history and geography they entail. Specifically, drawing on the works of writers, thinkers, and poets from the mid-19th century to the present, I trace a tradition of reflection that engages the city’s unique sensory and architectural configuration as the basis from which to reassess Spain’s relation to Islam, North Africa, and the Middle East. I conclude the talk with some general observations on the way the sensory and material infrastructure of Moorish Spain mediates and conditions the possibilities of finding a place for Islam in the country today.

Iain Chambers 'Citizenship and belonging in postcolonial Europe'

This commences from the implicit critique of the juridical structures of legalised citizenship posed by the contemporary migrant in the planetary context of a migrating modernity. Here lies the nightmare and heart of darkness of Occidental ‘democracy’ that has historically and structurally required the negation of rights, freedoms and democracy to others in order to exercise its rights. From these premises I will then move to consider understandings of belonging secured in the informal urban languages of sounds, images and words, and their ways of seeing, receiving and reworking the world.

This event is part of the Migrating Dreams and Nightmares project (Oct 15 - Apr 16), organised by the Methods Lab, Goldsmiths.

Migrating Dreams and Nightmares takes its conceptual and methodological inspiration from John Berger and Jean Mohr's classic A Seventh Man (1975).

EXHIBITION Words and images from A Seventh Man, which was translated into different languages, have been re-enacted in the Kingsway Corridor by the artist Antoinette Brown, in collaboration with Nirmal Puwar. Chalk, blackboards and wire jolt the words out of the book and onto the walls of the academy. Contemporary graffiti from Larache’s harbour sits amongst selections from the book. In addition, Sadek Rahim’s sponge boats from his project No Crash! Boom! Bang!, originally installed in the Bibliothèque Nationale d'Alger, hang in the arches of the passageway. In a linked-in off-site exhibition in the Stuart Hall Library Alia Syed and Nadia Perrotta have responded to Berger and Mohr’s book and Syed’s longstanding interest in tunnels to examine the hopes and fears driving the movements of current migrants and refugees.

UPCOMING EVENTS Translating Dreams and Nightmares + Drinks 17 March 2016, 4.00-7.00pm, RHB Small Cinema, Goldsmiths. Rey Chow, Sukhdev Sandhu, Paul Bowman, Alia Syed and Antoinette Brown All events are free and open to the public.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With grateful thanks to the people without whom this project would not have materialised. To the artists: Antoinette Brown, Sadek Rahim, Alia Syed. To those who helped with the translations: Imran Ayata and Manuela Bojadzijev, Amarjit Chandan, Gilles Fage (Fage éditions and Nouvelles éditions Scala), Duran Kim (Duran Kim agency) and Teresa Pintó (Agencia Literaria). Thanks also to Nick Brown (Stuart Hall Library), to Di Robson and Gareth Evans (Artevents) for their loan of Mohr's photographs, and to Jean Mohr and John Berger for granting us the liberty to re-shuffle the text and images. Thanks to the Sociology Department, the Research Office at Goldsmiths, the Women's Art Library and the journal Sociological Review for financing the project.