Public Lecture: “A desire to thrive beyond survival” by Yancé-Myah Antonio Harrison
25 November, 18.30–20.00

Please join us for a public lecture by Yancé-Myah Antonio Harrison titled “A Desire to Thrive Beyond Survival”. The event will be held in English. 

In this lecture, Yancé-Myah Antonio Harrison will expand on the conceptual orientations of Saidiya Hartman’s seminal book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. By highlighting Hartman’s deep appreciation for those at the margins who carry intimate histories that manage to subvert and create while being caught in the web of control of power, Yancé-Myah is able to connect Hartman’s methodological implications to current grassroots struggles led by LGBTQ racialised and indigenous communities in the Öresund region. In the current political climate, the entrenching of borders, policing and criminalisation, and the aftermaths of slavery, war and (neo)colonialism playing out across the European continent, it remains crucial to extrapolate lessons across time, space and generations to center a politics of what Hartman calls “a collective movement [that] points toward what awaits us…; a glimpse of the earth not owned by anyone”. 

In conjunction with the public lecture, our exhibition Reading James Baldwin will be open for viewing from 17:00.

Biography
Yancé-Myah Antonio Harrison is a Black trans woman (by way of Jamaica) that has been involved with and created many grassroots initiatives serving working-class, QTIBIPOC, Black, and trans communities over the years. She centres on creating change through community infrastructure, with her own focus being on local and direct organising, popular and political education, and trans health care interventions. She is a guerrilla intellectual, disabled part-time hustler, a receptionist, a sexual health counsellor, a support worker and much more. She holds a Masters in Black British History. 

This lecture is presented as part of the series Beautiful Experiments, curated by Tawanda Appiah. Beautiful Experiments is a series of meditations by artists and art practitioners. It unravels form, unbuttons language, and embraces process as its central methodology. Resisting expectation, it turns towards the radical possibilities of imagination—towards ways of living and creating the ‘otherwise’.

Supported by Öppna Malmö, Malmö City.

Photo credit: Olafur Steinar Gestsson/Ritzau Scanpix