Pablo Luis Álvarez

‘The waste lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase – unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back.’ (The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten).

Institutions are powerful: they have a plan and we are all part of it. Some people are welcomed, some are othered, some are manipulated. And yet, we believe that institutions have gaps where we can hide; rabbit-holes through which we can pass underground, into what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call ‘the undercommons.’ Can we use institutional spaces in our favour? Can we exploit our complicity? Is it possible to be fugitive within the institution?

The Unexpected Beautiful Phrase is a one-day event that took place on Saturday May 4th, 2019, in Nottingham Contemporary’s The Space, exploring the tactics of a ‘fugitive learning’; a learning on the run. The fugitive, propose Harney and Moten, occupies a space of perpetual contradiction, simultaneously within and beyond the institution: ‘on the stroIl of the stolen life’, yet reliant on the institution as a place from which to steal. 

Through a series of performative gestures, including conversation, film and poetry, we have considered how different individuals and communities can navigate and subvert institutional and educational spaces from within, seeking new modes of learning. This programme included responses from Christopher Kirubi, Dorine Van Meel with Jules Sturm, Raju Rage, Rosa Johan Uddoh with Department for International Dance Development, Holly Pester, and a film screening by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. 

The Unexpected Beautiful Phrase is the second in a series of events in the lead-up to CAMPUS, a new independent studies programme launching at Nottingham Contemporary in October 2019.