Vladmail

SESSION #1

COPY PASTE PROPAGANDA: IBERIAN EDITION

On the first session we looked the Spanish Inquisition, its structure and significance within its contemporary time and the present narrative of the Islamic presence on the Iberian peninsula. We also looked at Islamic architecture on the Iberian peninsula, where we discussed the impossibility of segregating influences. Through this we observed a long history of aesthetics’ use as a political tool, the Great Mosque of Cordoba being a significant example. We finally looked at the bureaucratisation of the Inquisition, and its implications beyond its geographic and temporal frame.

Presenting: Litchi Ly Friedrich

Commenting: Sepideh Behruzian, Raúl Silva & Hannah O’Flynn

SESSION #2

SEAGULL CRAP ISLANDS

This session was on Tupac Amaru, the change of paradigm and the modernisation of Peru. An introduction of Peruvian history, we looked at pre-Hispanic approaches to economy, sociology, family, etc. in relation to colonisation in the 16th century. This led to discussing the process of modernisation and how structures of social inequality are based in history. As well, the change of paradigm in relation to the landscape due to Christianity/Catholicism, which transformed the relationship between nature and God, and allowed for systems of extraction to exist. Towards the end of the session we looked at the relationship of some political and revolutionary movements, ideas and groups from the 1950s onwards with the pre-Hispanic cultures will be presented.

Presenting: Raúl Silva

Commenting: Hubert Gromny, Litchi Ly Friedrich & Hannah O'Flynn

SESSION #3

VLADMAIL RECORDS vol.3: ENGULFING

This session turned around Hannah O’Flynn’s developing research for her thesis. The central question of this session was to look at how the fiction of the infinite reproduction of capital has been historically constructed. To do this, we examined the mechanism of the spatial frontier of appropriation, a.k.a. the colonial project of capitalism. Attention was be put on the exploitation of the colonised subject and the woman’s body, agricultural technology and the acceleration of “natural” reproductive time into the time of capital. This was done in dialogue with the Hong Kongnese horror film ‘Dumplings’, by Fruit Chan.

Presenting: Hannah O'Flynn

Commenting: Amitabh Rai, Raúl Silva, Sepideh Behruzian, Rafael Mayu Nolte, Litchi Ly Friedrich & Ian Nolan

SESSION #4

POTATO FISTS: Round 1

Getting to Know You: Everything You Wanted to Know About Ireland and England but You were Afraid to Ask (the year dot - 1852)

This session looked at the long history of the colonial relationship between Ireland and England. In it we discussed the events and legal precedents established in the construction of pre-colonial Europe, and their relation to the constitution of the colonial systems that followed.

Presenting: Ian Nolan

Commenting: Hannah O'Flynn, Litchi Ly Friedrich, Rafael Mayu Nolte, Raúl Silva, Gizem Koç

SESSION #5

VLADMAIL RECORDS vol. 538: Indebted with Vladimiro

This session,  a continuation of session #3, was on Hannah O’Flynn’s second thesis block witch was in the process of being destroyed. This time we looked at neoliberal mechanisms of capital reproduction through debt relations. Specific examples that were discussed were: uneven geographical development through debt and colonial histories, the subprime crisis and the dispossession of the black and latinx communities in the US, and the 2008 financial crisis, with special attention given to the Greek case.

Presenting: Hannah O'Flynn

Commenting: Hubert Gromny, Litchi Ly Friedrich, Raúl Silva & Francisco Mojica

SESSION #6

WELEDA AND THE NAZIS

In this session we looked at esoteric Hitlerism, the occult, and Nazism's relationship to coloniality. We then looked at what this history can tell us about the right and its present's networking and organisation.

Presenting: Elias Haase

Commenting: Amit Rai, Hassan Özgur Top, Sepideh Behruzian, Raúl Silva, Ian Nolan, Litchi Ly Friedrich, Hannah O'Flynn & Hubert Gromny

SESSION #7

PIRATE PPT INCEPTION: 

Wind-shattered voices, the tales in shells and wrecks along the coasts of South China Sea

When it comes to historical imagination, it is usually based on empires/nation-states and is shaped by borders. This session attempted to bring the attention to those people and figures who lived largely out of such narratives and defied borders. When one shifts the geographical centre of narratives, a ghostly topography emerges: of marginal insurgence, autonomy and at times well defined criminality (in contrast to warfares, lawful oppression and legitimised exploitation).

In this session we discussed how these sea-bound traditions interfere the land-based orthodox narratives. To do this, we looked at he traces of those criminalised who attempted to subvert state power, and the unseen hands who financed their revolutionary entrepreneurship.

Presenting: Liu Chao

Commenting: Sepideh Behruzian, Raúl Silva, Ian Nolan, Litchi Ly Friedrich & Hannah O'Flynn

SESSION #10

HOW DID HUBERT GET BABY LENIN BADGES? ON TODAY’S EPISODE…

Historical Materialism – Colonialism – Black Nationalism

In this session we discussed the limits of the historical materialist ontological framework when thinking the racial architecture of colonialism. What motivated the discussion of the topic is the prevailing presence of historical materialism in the critical discourses on global configurations under capitalism. The main points of departure for this session were the works of Denise Ferreira da Silva “Toward a Global Idea of Race” and Cedric Robinson’s “The Limits of Western Radicalism: The Making of Black Radical Tradition”. An example of such a limit would be how the value produced in the colonial slave system as well as the dispossession of land of Indigenous peoples has been considered as outside the capitalistic mode of production and categorised instead as “primitive accumulation” – placing them as the pre-history of capital. Another limit would be the question of resistance of the global subaltern to being politically represented as a unified working class subject. 

Presenting: Hubert Gromny

Commenting: Flavia Palladino, Amit Rai, Ian Nolan, Litchi Ly Friedrich, Liu Chao & Hannah O'Flynn

SESSION #14

A DIAGRAM OF A DIAGRAM OF A DIAGRAM

This session was an introduction to the ideas in the chapter Many Politics, from Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet’s Dialogues.

Presenting: Amit Rai

Commenting: Litchi Ly Friedrich, Hannah O’Flynn, Sepideh Behruzian, Rosalia Namsai Engchuan

SESSION #15

COMPLICATED HAPPINESS

In this session we discussed the film of Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, Complicated Happiness. The film is inspired by the Thai Park in Berlin: a meeting place since more than 20 years for Thai migrant women that transformed into a tourist attraction that has become too big. Now there are already plans for its transformation, and it is unlikely that this process can be stopped. This attempt at formalization of the informal will fail: most Thai women I spoke to do not plan to follow the transformation of Thai Park. This place will soon be a distant memory. What many forget is that this park was never first and foremost about selling food. What people see is the commodification of authentic food and the need to regulate informal economic practices. What they don’t see is the people. Once again Thai women are hypervisible so that they themselves become invisible. This video is set in the future at a time when the Thai Park is no longer there. It is a reminder of the liminality of social spaces and through a fictional storyline allows the Thai women to leave before they are forced to do so.

The presentation of the film was then followed by a discussion on the racial and gendered implications local government health and safety policies, as well as gentrification projects.

Presenting: Rosalia Namsai Engchuan

Commenting: Raúl Silva, Assem Hendawi, Litchi Ly Friedrich, Hannah O’Flynn, Amit Rai, Hubert Gromny

SESSION #16

A DISENLIGHTENED DREAM

In this session we discussed the performance work of Hannah O’Flynn, Dust Floating in the Dark // A Disenlightened Dream, done with the help of Litchi Ly Friedrich as a performer. The performance meanders through thoughts on around ocular-centrism, colonial tools for control, binary thinking, the Enlightenment and the metaphorical constructions of light and dark, and Dutch windows.

The session then developed into a discussion on the possible violence of metaphors, and traps of binary thinking.

Presenting: Hannah O’Flynn

Commenting: Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, Raúl Silva, Litchi Ly Friedrich, Amit Rai

SESSION #18

“those who tremble when the world is quivering, those who shudder the the world is shivering”

This session was a discussion on Manthia Diawara’s documentary One World in Relation on Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Specifically on the understandings of being in relation, thinking against essentialised identities that flatten out complexity, on unreadability and the violence of wanting to understand or excluding what cannot be understood. 

Presenting:  Litchi Ly Friedrich, Hannah O’Flynn

Commenting: Zane Zajanckauska, Najendra Caldera, Amit Rai, Hubert Gromny

SESSION #20

WHAT’S A SANDWICH WHEN THE FILLING IS BREAD?

In this session we discussed Hannah O’Flynn’s ongoing research on the colonial history of the baguette. This research stems from an ongoing collaborative research on the politics of food with Vita Buivid, developed from an initial performance with Vita Buivid, Francisco Mojica and Giorgos Gripeos. 

In this session we first traced back into the relation of wheat importation by the Spanish to the colonised Americas and the violent construction of race by the colonisers. We later looked into the development of the baguette in relation to the French Revolution and the development of a new understanding of labour. We finally discussed the apparition and popularisation of the baguette and the baguette sandwich across several of the French colonies, and their significance in relation to new forms of labour, mobility and “life styles”.

Presenting: Hannah O’Flynn

Commenting: Amit Rai, Litchi Ly Friedrich, Raúl Silva