May 22th, 2019
7pm

Self-Grafting: Queer Procreation as a Decolonizing Practice Lecture by Katrin Pahl

This lecture will address the current IKKM focus on “Turning Back / (Self-)reflecting” by exploring the operations of grafting, self-grafting and inosculating. In addition to the material logic of these vegetal unions and non-heterosexual forms of reproduction, I will attend to their emotional logic by studying plant-human behavior with regard to the histories of colonialism and sexualized violence sedimented in bodies and psyches. After an analysis of the characters in Heinrich von Kleist’s tragic play Penthesilea (1808) who offer an imaginative model of queer human-vegetal procreation, the lecture turns to a discussion of Otobong Nkanga’s multi-media installation “We Could Be Allies” (2017–2018) and Masayo Kajimura’s paper cuttings from 2014-2018.