Sisters in Crime: Murdering Josephine is a closed study-group that comprises of an invited assembly of readers from different fields and practices and is a foundation stone of artist Rana Hamadeh’s new long-term project with Witte de With, with the title, The Ten Murders of Josephine culminating with an exhibition in Fall 2017. The group aims at generating a space to think out loud, and together, of questions related to contemporary corporate and state-sponsored infrastructures of justice in relation to the notion of “testimoniality".
Through a self-initiated syllabus, the group is invited to consider the question of testimonial subjectivity as substitutive of legal subjectivity. The initial focus is on terms and notions related to legality, theatre, justice, militarism, work, immunity, and governmentality. Material on the genre of legal spectacle, labor theory of value, histories of slavery and the notion of ‘black performance’, Quranic exegesis and Arabic modal musical scales, Kafka’s Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, and material on opera, form the initial proposal of where the study group begins.
Session 1: Introduction to The Ten Murders of Josephine, with a presentation by Carolina Rito.
Session 2: Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
Session 3: Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997)
Session 4: Walter Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence', in Reflections; Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1969)
Session 5: Spike Lee, Bamboozled, (2000)
Session 6: Walter Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence', in Reflections; Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1969) & Carl Schmidt, Political Theology; Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1934)
Session 7: Denise Ferreira da Silva, No-BODIES; Law, Raciality and Violence (2009)
Session 8: Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book; Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989)
Session 9: Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book; Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) & Sara Ahmed, 'A Willfulless Archive', in Theory & Event, (2012).
Session 10: Franz Kafka, Josephine the Songstress or The Mouse Folk (1924) led by Aaron Schuster.
Session 11: Jonathan Demme, Stop Making Sense, (1984) & an open letter to Witte de With.
Session 12: A return to Spike Lee, Bamboozled, (2000)
Participants include: Liz Allan, Lila Athanasiadou, Maja Bekan, Karima Boudou, Madison Bycroft, Andre Castro, Kris Dittel, Galit Eliat, Angelica Falkeling, Annie Fletcher, Layal Ftouni, Quinsy Gario, Rosa de Graaf, Fokus Grupa, Sara Hamadeh, Samia Henni, Natasha Hoare, Dirar Kalash, Hicham Khalidi, Katherine MacBride, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Francois Quintin, Carolina Rito, Kari Robertson, Luuk Schroeder, Aaron Schuster, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Nisreen El Shaer, Giulia Tongon.