FRACTAL THINKING

A conversation between Denise Ferreira da Silva and Susanne Winterling

As part of her on-going conversational project, Pandora Box artist Susanne Winterling will be
joined by professor Desire Ferreira da Silva to talk about poethical ethics, the practice of the
‘what If’, and fractal thinking.

Ferreira da Silva proposes that we understand fractal thinking as a way of welcoming the
complexity and complication resulting from an engagement with existents and events that,
refusing the empire of time, attends simultaneously to the infra (quantic) and supra (cosmic)
dimensions of existence. Ferriera da Silva situates this proposal within her larger offering to
the unthinking of the world, black feminist poethics, which she draws from the work of black
feminist and other radical interventions. As a poethical tool, fractal thinking rehearses the
kind of compositional thinking that she hopes can break through the formalisations of the
kind of thinking that relies only on the Understanding’s capacity to related to the world as an
object.

Initiated by artist Susanne Winterling, Pandora Box is “a collective artefact which started with
a group of artists, poets and cultural producers, as they began talking to each other from
different angles and unusual positions.” Using the format of the conversation, Pandora Box
explores the possibilities of forming alliances and creating networks of solidarity to think the
world anew.

The series of conversations that compose Pandora Box are available online at
http://pandorasbox.susannewinterling.com.

Pandora Box will soon become a book published by Archive Books.

The event is hosted by Federica Bueti, Chiara Figone and Susanne Winterling.

Bio:
Denise Ferreira da Silva is Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender,
Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia. Her academic
writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the
metaphysical and onto-epistemological dimensions of modern thought. Academic
publications include Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and
the edited volume Race, Empire, and The Crisis of the Subprime (with Paula Chakravartty,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). She is the principal editor for the
Routledge/Cavendish book series Law, Race, and the Postcolonial (with Mark Harris and
Brenna Bhandar). She has written for publications of the 2016 Liverpool and São Paulo
Biennials and creates events and texts as part of her Poethical Readings practice in
collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She was an advisor to Natasha Ginwala, curator of the
Contour 8 Biennale (Mechelen, 2017).

Susanne Winterling works across a range of media to explore the sentient economy, digital
cultures and the social life of materials across our built environment. Winterling’s recent
practice reflects upon political as well as aesthetic solidarity among human and animal
species in today’s challenging geopolitical context. She also remains focused on historical
feminist practices and the commons. Winterling is a professor of Contemporary Art at the
Academy of Fine Art in Oslo and a professor of Sculpture at HfG Offenbach.