AY 2021-22: “Return”
The more people become vaccinated and lockdown restrictions are lifted, we find ourselves confronted with the impossible concept of “return.” Of going back to work. To school. To “normal.” But is it even possible to go back? And do we want to? Not only did the pandemic upend pre-Covid lifeways, but it also exposed the deep inequities and injustices of our systems in ways that make the idea of “returning to normal” feel more like a threat than an aspiration. As the public theologian Ekemini Uwan writes, “Striving to return to an old ‘normal’ would ensure that the mechanisms of oppression keep turning. We are not going back to normal; we are pushing toward a new normal—one that is more sustainable and equitable than the one we left behind, one in which everyone might flourish.”
Artists—particularly those whose experiences have been shaped by dispossession, displacement, and exile—have long created work meant to help us think through the concept and nature of “return” as an aspiration, a fool’s errand, and a threat. What is it that we want to return to and does it even exist? And if returning is, in fact, an impossibility or—worse—an existential threat, then what is it that we can strive toward? What might we actually want to recover from the past and what might we need to leave behind? How might we mourn the passing of old ways and imagine new ways of being in the world?
These are just some of the questions that will motivate the conversations that we’ll be having with our guest artists throughout the 2021-2022 academic year and our theme of “return.”
Artists—particularly those whose experiences have been shaped by dispossession, displacement, and exile—have long created work meant to help us think through the concept and nature of “return” as an aspiration, a fool’s errand, and a threat. What is it that we want to return to and does it even exist? And if returning is, in fact, an impossibility or—worse—an existential threat, then what is it that we can strive toward? What might we actually want to recover from the past and what might we need to leave behind? How might we mourn the passing of old ways and imagine new ways of being in the world?
These are just some of the questions that will motivate the conversations that we’ll be having with our guest artists throughout the 2021-2022 academic year and our theme of “return.”