&Now 2019 Conference

Blending reading, performance, and multimedia spectacle, this panel brings together four wide-ranging writer-artists to explore failure as a productive space.

The presented works resonate with what Jack Halberstam describes in The Queer Art of Failure as “the unregulated territories of failure”: an anti-capitalist and potentially revolutionary landscape. The incorporation of failure into artistic practice offers potential for “new rationales for knowledge production, different aesthetic standards for ordering or disordering space, other modes of political engagement than those conjured by the liberal imagination.” To willfully inhabit “territories of failure,” in other words, offers potential for alternate, counter-hegemonic modes of production.

How, then, can we begin to map these territories? How might failure illuminate a path towards the future in a moment when we appear to have none?

In this panel, four writer-artists—each working across a variety of mediums and forms—will share poetry, prose, comics, and video that engage with failure as a positive and inherently political space of creation.