The Meal is Language

This is a gathering for the delusional, for the imaginative, the ones in this world but not of this world. Taking inspiration from Lola Olufemi’s work, we will open up a space for thinking otherwise. Otherwise as in, ‘the political horizon awaits’, as in ‘the firm embrace of the unknowable’, as in refusing the structures that confine while thinking of other ways of existing. Join us and sit down in conversation, as we ask ourselves and each other: What else is possible when we start to imagine another world?

We will meet each other at the Sofreh Daimeh, a spatial poem by Yusser Salih; a metaphorical yet real space of hosting otherwise. Here, surrounding the plastic sofreh, we will host a collective conversation – a meal of words, if you will. Please come hungry with questions and full of wishes. We’re here to exchange strategies. Let’s cook up the future from our feelings, hopes and dreams.

Lola Olufemi’s intervention is part of the seminar series Promiscuous Infrastructures, which the Promiscuous Care Study Group has programmed in collaboration with Reading Room Rotterdam. The seminar series Promiscuous Infrastructures extends offerings to interdisciplinary and multifaceted conversations devoted to care infrastructure and pedagogies of care. Hosted by the Social Practices research program at WdKA Research Center, the Promiscuous Care Study Group gathers under the aegis of study using individual and collective care practices as sites of inquiry. The study group cultivates research around care in the institution, communal responsibility and accountability practices, intimate pedagogies, slow reading practices, hospitality and hosting, soil and contamination, counter-histories, and collective grief. More info.

About Lola Olufemi

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

About Yusser Salih

Yusser Salih is a decolonial feminist writer and designer who seeks to acknowledge and enable the radical potential of intimate relational spaces. Her practice revolves around intimate forms of publishing and the mobilization of alternative knowledge circulation patterns for writing that sits close at the skin. Her central concern: how can we affirm other ways of being/knowing?