Join us for the online lecture Happy Tears – the uncertain life of the party by artist and writer Brandon LaBelle. As part of a lecture series following R27: Party as Form, Brandon LaBelle will offer perspectives on parties as creative get-togethers.

Following creative research developed for the project Party Studies, LaBelle offers a consideration of wreckage as fundamental to parties: from bodily exuberance and breakdown to collective rapture, parties are highlighted as anarchic worldings prone to excess and intensities of felt-experience, a being-with-with, and which oscillate unevenly between hospitality and aggression, love and pain. Furthermore, the party is adopted as an epistemic location, where revelry is captured as a knowledge practice: to relish the night, to collaborate with all types of matter, to exhaust oneself through radical (un)doing. What does the party teach us? And how to carry the party with us, back into the daylight? Partying will be considered, following Harney and Moten, as a form of study, as what generates passionate discovery, where knowledge production is equally anti-production, a breaking-down, non-knowledge, leading to what Georges Bataille calls Happy Tears. Together we’ll reflect upon these perspectives, thinking in what ways festivity may act as a general ethic.

Join here

The event is free and open to all. Join the Zoom call via this link.

About Brandon LaBelle

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-21), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), among others.

Background Information

The Party as Form lecture series grew out of PRAKSIS Residency 27: Party as Form, convened this past May & June by Kelly Lloyd and Shannon Stratton.

Party as Form is Shannon Stratton, a curator and writer based in Chicago who taught the first session of Party as Form at Ox-Bow School of Art in 2012, and Kelly Lloyd, a transdisciplinary artist and educator working out of London who inherited the delivery of Party as Form at Ox-Bow. The participating residents are: Fergus Tibbs, an artist, DJ, and cultural producer originally from Scotland, now based in Bergen, Norway. 'Tope Ajayi, a Nigerian multi-disciplinary artist and a cultural curator. Banu Çiçek Tülü, a sound artist, music producer, DJ and researcher from Turkey based in Berlin. Tor Lukasik-Foss, an artist, songwriter and storyteller living in Hamilton, Ontario. Matilda Moors, a London-based artist and educator. Sara Clugage, an artist, writer and editor, living and working in the United States. Åste Amundsen, an artist and researcher creating live interactive experiences, born in Oslo currently working from Germany. Lexie Owen, an Oslo-based interdisciplinary artist from Canada.

Party as Form is supported by KORO (Public Art Norway)