After a prolonged period of human absence from the Sandberg Institute due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the building’s windowsills were littered with deceased insects. Encountering them led me to question what and who else happens unseen from the institution, both in our absence and our presence. Guided by Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons, I wondered how other positions exist in and beside our institution, how they are inhabited, and how we can create space(s) to accommodate them.

Coming from a predominantly academic background, I have spent the past two years negotiating the (supposed) separation between academic theory and artistic practice. This project is the outcome of that negotiation: 11 propositions for post-disciplinarity is a proposal for post-disciplinarity as a practice that fuses, yet simultaneously situates itself beyond this binary - contemplating alternative ways of positioning oneself beside(s) the institutional.

The video installation Unrequited Recognition part II considers the nature of contemporary image- making technologies, examining their increasingly reflexive capacities in, for example, pattern recognition software. By drawing attention to their (mis)recognitions, the work considers how these technologies increasingly mirror the formation of a subjective identity (as understood in psychoanalysis) and thereby produce an unconscious that makes itself known through slips: when they cease to work as we expect them to.

This work is made in collaboration with Nicholas Reilly-McVittie, an alumnus of the Critical Studies programme. His research practice moves between theoretical writing, image-making and film. He has a background in graphic design and programming.