Intimacy/Infrastructure Panel

The juxtaposition of “intimacy” and “infrastructure” might seem paradoxical: Infrastructure is, by definition, composed of material and immaterial relations that interchange or express movement. It’s the structures that make society operate (government, education, hospitals, power stations, cables, pipelines, etc.) and it enables, sustains, and/or enhances societal living conditions—until it ruptures. Intimacy, on the other hand, is a term of unbound meaning. It is a synonym for proximity or close relations. Intimate relations imply affect, or a looking inward, often embodied, private, and psychological. And yet, these two rubrics have been together animating conversations around relational life as of late, especially in the work of a number of artists.

Diving into both concepts through the participatory role of language, affect, and infrastructural studies, the panel brings together notable scholars and poets Juliana Spahr (Mills at Northeastern University), Ara Wilson (Duke University), Kai Bosworth (Virginia Commonwealth University) and Roberto Tejada (University of Houston) with moderation by Jennifer Teets (Mitchell Center Visiting Artist and Curator) and Michael D. Snediker (University of Houston) acting as respondent.

Intimacy/Infrastructure is presented in conjunction with Intimate confession is a project, a group exhibition currently on view at Blaffer Art Museum that considers transmission, intergenerational life, and cultural inheritance through the prism of intimacy and infrastructure. It is a collaboration between multiple University of Houston academic programs and centers: the Mitchell Center, Blaffer Art Museum, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and the Department of English.

Date:

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 (6:00pm-8:45pm)

6:00pm reception, Blaffer Art Museum Extended Open Hours to 6:30pm

7:00pm-8:45 pm Panel Discussion followed by Q+A

Location + Parking:

The reception is at Blaffer Art Museum. Panel is located next door in Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture Auditorium (ARCH 150), Parking validation for Elgin Street Garage will be validated at the museum.

Format:

Panel, “Intimacy/Infrastructure,” in conjunction with the Blaffer Art Museum exhibition, Intimate confession is a project

In collaboration with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and the Department of English at the University of Houston.

Moderator:
Jennifer Teets is a curator and writer born in Houston, Texas in 1978 and living in Paris, France since 2009. She is the curator of Intimate confession is a project currently on view at the Blaffer Art Museum until March 10, 2024.

Guests:

Juliana Spahr is an Associate Professor of English at Mills College at Northeastern University. Her many books of poetry include That Winter the Wolf Came (2015); Well Then There Now (2011); The Transformation (2007); This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005); Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another (2003); Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (2001); Response (1996), which won a National Poetry Series Award; Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism (1998); and Nuclear (1994).

Ara Wilson is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is also an Affiliate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society.

Kai Bosworth is Assistant Professor of International Studies in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Bosworth is the author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (2022) which examines the possibilities and limitations of pipeline opposition movements in the central United States in grounding the popular politics of climate justice.

Roberto Tejada is Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. He is the author of poetry collections that include Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). His book Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019) is a Latinx poetics attuned to colonial settlements and cultural counter-conquest; intersections of history and metaphor in art and writing of the Americas.

Respondents:
Michael D. Snediker is Professor of English at the University of Houston where he teaches courses in early American literature (especially mid-late 19th century), poetry and poetics, transcendentalism, Henry James, modernism, queer theory, disability theory and aesthetics. His most recent monograph, “Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment” (U. Minnesota Press, 2021) theorizes aesthetic phenomenologies of chronic pain across the long American 19th century.

Image:
Clémence de La Tour du Pin
Arrangement IX: Peculiar Sweet Matter, 2023
Sealing wax, beeswax mixed with oil substance, pigment, wood, steel frame
180 x 85 x 85 cm / 70.87 x 33.46 x 33.46 in
Photo: Francisco Ramos. Courtesy Blaffer Art Museum

This discussion is held in partnership with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts.