Description
A series of letters written between the collaborative duo Sandra Ruiz & Hypatia Vourloumis, co-authors of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of This World. Turning to the epistolary as a practice and mechanism for uncovering how thought, experience, and knowledge processes are inherently dialogic, Ruiz & Vourloumis place pressure on the regulatory infrastructures and conditions of individuation and exchange. Decentralizing and redistributing sites of sharing and connection, the book asks the reader/listener to travel down the narrowest of gatherings and passages known as the alleys—hidden planetary meeting spots and counter paths for correspondence and movement, both ephemeral and material, marginal and vital, everywhere and nowhere.
Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Hybrid. Literary Criticism. History. Art. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Miscellaneous.
”Shows how supposedly marginal sites, histories, ideas, and ways of being can connect us and form the vital infrastructure necessary for the emergence of new, more just worlds. As we have exhausted the possible (and become utterly exhausted with what is possible), it is in the alleys where we find routes to impossible futures that exceed the frames of capitalist exploitation and degradation.” — Marisol Lebrón
“Ruiz and Vourloumis write in response to each other’s ruminations on aesthetics, writing, form, friendship, time, infrastructure, dispossession, crisis, and the intimacy of revolt. Showing us how thought wanders and flourishes in wandering.” — Shane Vogel
“Attends to how we can experiment with and beyond the form of academic critique, in the affirmation of a formless, deterritorializing, revolutionary love. As epistolary, dialogic counter-theorization, as collective Undercommon study of our racial capitalist present and past, THE ALLEYS shifts our attention again to the patterned but unpredictable murmurations of resistance.” — Amit Rai
“Marks collaborative writing as an ephemeral yet persistent infrastructure of friendship, mutual attendance, and critical aesthetics in/for times of infrastructural necropolitics. Through a nuanced and heartfelt immanent infrastructural critique beyond and against a racial-colonial-capitalist logic, they take us through the trails and alleyways of Black, Brown, Indigenous, feminist, queer, diasporic epistemologies and struggles. This remarkably vibrant book guides us in thinking through the ongoing importance of reinhabiting these haunted alleyways as counterpublic passages for fugitivity, refuge, disorientation and transformative intimacy.” — Athena Athanasiou
Author Bio
Sandra Ruiz is the Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (NYU Press, 2019), co-author with Hypatia Vourloumis of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World (Minor Compositions, 2021), and creator of La Estaci�n Gallery.
Author City: URBANA, IL USA
Hypatia Vourloumis is a performance theorist and co- author of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World (Minor Compositions, 2021) (with Sandra Ruiz). She teaches at the Dutch Art Institute.
Author City: ATHENS GRC