Afterall ArtSchool’s programme Hiding in Plain Sight explores alternative approaches to study conceived in the shadows. Drawing from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s conceptualisation of the ‘undercommons’, this programme invites arts practitioners, theorists, and students to orient their practice outside the mould of institutional apparatuses.
In the opaque shadow of surveillance systems, screened surfaces, and networked cables that increasingly mediate communication channels and educational spaces broadly defined, we posit darkness as an opening for new modalities of thought and creation. Attentive to the theoretical parallels between the ontological condition of Blackness and planetary dark matter as ‘invisible and unknowable, yet somehow still there’ invoked by Black studies and surveillance studies scholar Simone Browne, this project emphasises darkness and shadows as grounds for speculation, contestation, and possibility.
The shadow can be approached in a variety of tangents, through subterranean networks, markets, and systems; obstructions (or facilitators?) to growth; storytelling and gossip; phantoms; and mimicry, among many others. Hiding in Plain Sight is an invitation to ‘step through the shadows’, in the words of scholar and researcher Matthew Houdek.
