KEYNOTE: ‘Fashioning a Tool—de/re/composition’ by Denise Ferreira da Silva

Join us for a KEYNOTE with Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva, delving into her latest book Unpayable Debt published in 2022 by MIT and Sternberg Press. The lecture, titled ‘Fashioning a Tool - de/re/composition’, addresses the character of Dana from Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred. Through the narrative image of time-travel, Ferreira da Silva re-visits the racial composition of time, and questions the true form of social and political change.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a scholar and artist renowned for her powerful theoretical interventions into the ethico-political challenges of the global present. Building on her previous work, in Unpayable Debt Ferreira da Silva revisits Dana’s time-travel between the slave plantations of the American South and California of the 1970s as a way of understanding the racial politics of the 2007-8 global financial crisis and its aftermath.

This program is co-presented by Kunstinstituut Melly and the Blacker Blackness Masters’ program of the Sandberg Institute. The keynote program together with a Q&A will be led by Blacker Blackness program coordinator Ola Hassanain, together with artist and poet Jota Mombaça.