On Unbelonging

This series of events draws together artists, architects, activists, geographers and poets to map our contemporary urban landscape, exploring processes of displacement and the feelings of precariousness that these can evoke. Addressing the future for communities effected by forced transitions, these talks, performances and workshops ask how we might best navigate such complex times as the current, outwitting austerity logic and finding possibility in the current crisis.

Developed in conversation with ICA exhibiting artist Stuart Middleton, these talks and readings address insidious forms of structural oppression, exploring their effects and potential forms of resistance.

Poet Bhanu Kapil performs sections from her work Humanimal, a book in which she stresses the importance of erasing dualisms such as man and woman, and human and animal, that serve to create structures of opposition, rather than spaces of hybridity. In panel discussion Urban Planning as Social Cleansing, geographer Steven Graham talks with activists, academics and architects who are working to resist housing precarity, rampant property speculation and the negative effects of regeneration. In late June, writer Derica Shields presents Heavy Non-Presence: Blackness and the British Countryside, a programme of events that spring from a consideration of how black women affected by cuts are organising to navigate and refuse austerity logic.