Title: The Political Kitchen
Year: 2021
Duration: 4 hrs 50 min

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Some Time-Sensitive Questions

The Political Kitchen is a coming together of artists, thinkers, and activists to form one group among a number who have been assembling weekly over these many months of intermittent “lockdown”, “self-isolation”, and “social distancing” to try and build collectively a vocabulary and analysis of this time, of this conjuncture, of the pre-existing conditions, and the struggles in our midst.

What time are we in? What is this time of the virus and which other times or relations to time does it open onto?

In its capacity to disrupt and reorganize the uses and experiences of everyday life, the virus has opened up a wider set of questions around time - toward not only the time of the catastrophe, disaster, or apocalypse, but also what could be recovered time, reappropriated time, other uses of time.

And more than that, this disruption of the 'normal' procedures and conducts of life has opened up to histories ... ideas of progress, of conditions marked by coloniality, modernity, wars, insurgencies, counter-insurgencies, relations, abstractions, contagions, beings, life forms, infrastructures, destructions, enclosures, evictions, precarities, institutions of knowledge, subjugations, obfuscations, mutilations of care, genocides, denialisms, oblivions, survivals, degradations of the common premises of life, threats to life, cuts through life and difference ... prompting further questions.

Which are the conditions that have rendered certain bodies disposable, expendable, sacrificable, vulnerable both historically and more violently today? What are we capable to do or undo to abolish or strike against those conditions? And what are we striking for in our movements of abolition, of feminism, of queering, commoning, communizing, and decolonizing?

Prompted by the virus, this Polyphonic Political Kitchen prepares a situation for thinking and voicing together - proposing to map and share time-sensitive questions which the virus opens, complicates, and pushes to the fore:

What is this time of the virus?
What is the time of the apocalypse?
What is the time of the strike?
What is the time of a feminist strike?
What is the time of abolition?
What is the shape of time?
How are we shaped by it?
What is the time we cannot measure?
What is the time we cannot speak of?
Which is the time of illness?
Which is the time of healing?
What is the time of care?
What is the time of fugitivity?
What is the time of everyday social reproduction?
What is the time of modernity/coloniality?*
What is the time of precedence?
What is ancestral time?
What is the time of disjunction?
What is the time of the common?
What time are we in?
What time are we escaping?
What time are we reclaiming?
What lies beyond end-time-thinking?
And how do these times creep into revolutionary possibilities?

*Faced with the inexistence of the word 'colonization' in Quechua language, a friend translated it as 'stolen time and memory.'

Liz Mason-Deese, Sherry Millner, Ernie Larsen, CK Raju, Rolando Vasquez, Hardip Mann, Sarah Lewison, Ann Messner, Kirsten Forkert, Peter Conlin, MPA, Claire Fontaine, Nick Mirzoeff, Jesal Kapadia, Jaspal Singh, Berno Odo Polzer, Suzanne Goldenberg, Jim Costanzo, Joscelyn Jurich, Christoph Keller, Avi Varma, Pia Lindman, Caspar Stracke, Pedro Lasch, Jaroslav Andel, Alan Smart, Alessandra Pomarico, Lucy Sternbach, Sanoja Bhaumik, Giulia Gabrielli, Ayesha Hameed, Reem Shadid, Mattia Pellegrini, Vahram Aghasyan, Emilio Fantin, Nazan Ustundag, Ayreen Anastas, Sabu Kohso, Rene Gabri, Begonia Santa-Cecilia, Luis Moreno-Caballud, Vahram Aghasyan, Harout Simonian, Anjalika Sagar,
Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Valiana Aguilar, Angel Ku, Annie Paradise, Manolo Callahan and more Friends to Come