Horizontal Conversations practice affirmative critique (Braidotti). Horizontal Conversations offer a recipe to put different disciplinary knowledges next to one another and performatively engage thinking in an intra-disciplinary way, necessarily maintaining poly-vocality, collaboration, complexity and non-linear ways of thinking together. Though engaging the problems of how words shift between situated contexts (Haraway), these conversations also ask what kind of cosmologies are necessary for horizontality between disciplines and for ideas to remain collaboratively thought and broad in use? Horizontal Conversations create the possibility to understand that knowing something is just as produced as anything else. This troubling of words and concepts is a gesture towards undoing the production of mastery with artists and academics. The subjects chosen in these conversations become living intersectional (Crenshaw) nodes of investigation that are personal, political and theoretical simultaneously.
In the context of Fluidity @ thealitLoren Britton invites specific guests and the public to reflect on the possibilities, actualities or challenges of Collective Practice and what ways their collaborations have flowed or not. They organise the conversation following this recipe:
2 hours / Conversation
Participants arranged comfortably in a wobbly circle
1. An organiser brings a word, concept or idea to a group of people from different professional backgrounds that has importance to their work (playful or serious, whichever desired). In this case: Fluidity & Stoppage & Collectivity
2. Add anti-oppressive facilitation techniques into the gathering including: inviting people to move freely around, to be positioned comfortably, to share their names and pronouns. Take time to arrive into the space with body and mind.
3. Share for around 10 minutes each thoughts on the chosen subject with the group, stirring occasionally. Ask questions for clarification.
4. Listen carefully. Discuss between participants. Consider if the subject that the conversation was organised around dissolved, became more firm or transformed.
The conversation will be in English, with translation to Lithuanian, German & American Sign Language if anyone should need it & it is free of charge for people to attend.