In the two-channel video installation 2265, we listen to a group of people discussing “capitalist colonialist futures and the prospect of populating Mars” in a scenario of potential widespread war and technological totalitarianism. In an empty theater, we are led by stream-of-consciousness projective reflections from each member of the group and their thoughts about societal transformation, imperialism, the future of the species, and black cosmology. 2265 is the result of a workshop that Adelita Husni-Bey (b. 1985, Milan/New York) carried out in collaboration with Authoring Action, a group of teen authors headed by spoken-word poet and screenwriter Nathan Ross Freeman and held at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem.
Radical education, new forms of pedagogy, and the political struggles of collectivities – these are topics that surround Husni-Bey’s practice. The artist regularly develops workshops, discussion platforms, and role-playing games, provoking debates and testing the limits of consensus and collective construction in an era of patriarchal capitalist oppression. Take for example White Paper: The Land (2014), a video produced in Cairo. This work addresses the voracity of the recent real-estate developments in the city and the displacement of working-class populations, along with its effect on citizens’ rights and communal structures. In the film we see a group of people sitting around a model of the future city of Cairo, they debate the conditions of life in the city and the changes that are about to happen in Egyptian society. Meanwhile they rearrange the buildings from one site to another, developing a common epistemology of space.
Policy planning, territorial politics, and the housing crisis are concerns that structure Husni-Bey’s overall practice. She has been majorly affected by the dynamics of sovereignty and control in relation to property and the public space, after experiencing London’s Olympics-led transformations. She deals with the micropolitics of memory by envisioning a possibility of archiving the affects of ephemeral communities and their territorial histories. Working with lawyers, activists, educators, and collectives, Husni-Bey explores the margins for policy discussion on a case-by-case basis and helps citizens develop arguments and tools for political emancipation. MM
self-presentation:
Part of my inheritance/debt I owe to Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Fred Moten, Emma Goldman, and the children of an experimental elementary school in Paris, the École Vitruve, aged seven, who taught me about public space. Part of my inheritance/debt I owe it to self-managed occupied social centers in Italy that showed me how to Reclaim the Street(s). Part of my inheritance/debt I owe to a capacity I have developed through making “art,” to balance on a tightrope through precarity, to accept the types of approximations we make everyday that are unaccounted for, that cannot be numbered or counted. Kind of like that scene in Hirokazu Koreeda’s 2004 film Nobody Knows where a parent’s disappearance isn’t tragic but a chance for their children to build a city of cardboard castles in the living room while everybody is out.
