'Exhausted Geographies'

On 1 March, 2018, the Research Unit in Public Cultures (RUPC) and the Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) hosted an exciting public lecture by Professor Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths, University of London), addressing the theme of Rogoff's forthcoming collection of essays, Exhausted Geographies (e-flux/ Verso, 2020).

"The concept of ‘exhausted geographies’ is intended to work against the grain both of the boundaries of the possible, and of location as the site of identity and knowledge. And so I have been thinking of exhaustion, in relation to political conflict, not as a mode of opting out and withdrawing, but as a means of recognising the limits of a logic that has dominated that conflict for most of its duration. I suspect that this will take the form of an act of treason, in Deleuze's sense of treachery - of a refusal to support and sustain that which demands it of you because it claims to support and sustain you. In the realm of living out long-term political conflict, treason and exhaustion are not unrelated to one another. Looking at some practices by Raad, Shawky, Ataman and Territorial Agency to understand certain instances of such a collapse into acts of historical, narrative and discursive dislocation."