RabachK VtP Collaboration Biography

For conceptualizing space and place, I think Doreen Massey’s work on spatial imaginations and space as being alive could add to both our thinking of space/place as an overall topic, but also to our imaginations as we think about constructing the actual gallery space in the spring: What does it mean to both conceptualize and visualize a space that is alive? For resources, I would recommend reading this interview with Doreen Massey or reading For Space (2005), one of her many publications. Another work that has been influential in my thinking on space and place is Katherine McKitttrick’s book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, which explores the ways black women have negotiated the meaning of places during and since the transatlantic slave trade. In this book, I was forced to think about how I (and we) read space. It also made me think of grounds, the soil, the earth, and its instability and uncertainty, which I think Kim refers to in her notes on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.  Madina Tlostanova’s book What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet: Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (2018) traces several different decolonial art exhibitions that attempt to build or at least imagine a decolonial future. I think this book is good to think about nostalgia as an art form, but also what it means to come from a specific place, one that is both within an empire, but yet on the periphery. In terms of toxicity, I’ve been thinking about the toxicity in my “place” as a pharmakon, and after reading Kim’s Toxic Trouble, I finally have language to use, as well as more context to think about the social history of toxicity. Thinking through some of this, then, how might Derrida’s understanding of trace add to our conversations on both place/space and toxicity? I may go back and look at Of Grammatology and Spivak’s introduction to see how it could relate to this project. Theorizing toxicity, I’ve also been thinking about the use of repetition and works by Kathleen Stewart, but perhaps more so of The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the America Uncanny by Susan Lepselter.