Studies Constellation. Olivier Marboeuf

The annual Studies Constellation fellowship invites key thinkers in contemporary theory to develop and constellate an annual research project around some of the questions that inspire the intellectual engagement of art, culture, and the museum with the present. 

THE RIOTER AND THE WITCH: REHEARSALS ON CULTURAL AND PARA-INSTITUCIONAL MEDIATION 

Like every magic ritual, a riot is a fleeting moment in which the invisible becomes visible. But, to receive its unspoken knowledge, one must commit oneself and put one’s body on the line– there is no knowledge without involvement. 

How might we summon this emancipatory power—as a tool of institutional mediation and transformation—without succumbing to the heritagisation, depoliticisation or commodification of the ways of life that are inherent to it? 

The research project proposed by Olivier Marboeuf takes the rioter and the witch as figures through which to study rituals of mediation that, from the margins, constantly challenge the museum as an institution. Marboeuf coins the term “witch mediation” (médiation sorcière) to conceive of mediation as a space of production of negotiated interpretations and narratives, where conditions of presence, interruption, recognition, representation and autonomy are brought into play through interwoven narratives and visions. Witch mediation thus invokes a collective politics of hallucination which, through situated repetition, summons the emancipatory powers of Caribbean storytelling and of the riot without fixing their representation.  

Hence, the question of storytelling is closely linked to that of repetition, which is, by its very nature, always different and situated. Each repetition takes place under specific conditions and is, therefore, a unique, open and unfixed event. Storytelling also requires a continuous collective presence to sustain and interpret it. This community of interpretation is the space where a myriad of perspectives are negotiated and where a narrative emerges that belongs to no one, as it cannot be articulated from a single point of view. 

The research, which conceives study as a collective practice, is methodologically grounded in the composition of speculative cartographies. These cartographies, created in collective sessions, generate particular spaces and times in which chance connections and encounters arise, disrupted temporalities, ghosts of other stories and their possible repetitions. Thus, they embody attempts to reconstruct another historical continuum: that of potential histories. 

Throughout the fellowship, the research is shared through seminars, workshops, and public programmes.