VCFA Faculty Dalida María Benfield: Institute of (im)Possible Subjects: Migratory Times

Institute of (im)Possible Subjects: Migratory Times 

The Institute of (im)Possible Subjects (IiS) is a transnational feminist collective of artists, writers, and researchers.

We are pleased to announce Migratory Times, a global art, research, and education initiative that will be our focus in 2016 and 2017.

We are recipients of an inaugural Abundance Foundation Out of Eden Community Arts Fellowship in support of the project’s launch.

We are working closely with collaborators globally, with primary nodes in S. Korea, the Philippines, and Colombia, engaging in translocal conversations on questions of global migrations, gender, and the politics of movement. Each of these nodes will host, in overlapping sequence, a series of exhibitions, screenings, educational events, and art and media production workshops. The main events, held outside of metropolitan centers, will emerge from research groups and learning circles engaging the experience of migrants and refugees in the different localities; the temporalities of migration; the geo-politics of human migration; and the racialized and gendered dimensions of migration.

The coordinators are Dalida María Benfield and Annie Fukushima, and the core research team includes Damali Abrams, Michelle Dizon, Jane Jin Kaisen, and tammy ko Robinson. Additional collaborators include the following artists, researchers, collectives, and centers: at land’s edge (Los Angeles, CA, USA.), An Hye-kyoung and Artspace C (Jeju, S. Korea), Clara Balaguer and the Office of Culture and Design (Manila, Philippines), Diásporas Críticas (Barcelona, Spain and Quito, Ecuador), Dreaming Tree (Seoul, S. Korea), Emi Kane (Oakland, CA, USA), Guston Sondin-Kung(Copenhagen, Denmark), Renan Laru-an and DiscLab (Manila, Philippines), Annette Markham and futuremaking.space (Århus University, Denmark), Pedro Pablo Gomez Moreno and SALASAB (Bogotá, Colombia), Robert Ochshorn (Berlin, Germany), Omnivore (Los Angeles, CA, USA), Lene Myong (Stavanger, Norway), and others.

Migratory Times constructs a translocal architecture for overlapping learning, research, and making circles across diverse sites. Over the course of the year, learning circles will be convened in person at local sites as well as through virtual networks, using popular education, participatory art, and co-design pedagogies. Additional experimental methodologies will be co-constructed with the Out of Eden Learn community, housed at Project Zero, a research organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The circles will produce conversations, workshops, open access publications, and contemporary art projects across the global nodes, each one an exhibition of a collective learning process about gender, migration, and time.

The Institute of (im)Possible Subjects collective opens multiple spaces and modalities for learning and knowing, including artists’ projects, visual and sound experiments, in-person guest lectures, public workshops, video installations and screenings, as well as online experiments in participatory knowledge sharing and annotation. IiS has been working together collaboratively since 2013 on scholarly, artistic, and educational endeavors, with an emphasis on engaging and sharing transnational feminist and im/migrant perspectives across disciplines, institutions, and global territorial boundaries.Nike air jordan Sneakers | Nike