Hope-Hopping

This collection of texts, accompanied by a series of artworks, speculates upon a new artistic ecology of displacement that emerges at the intersection between post-coloniality, cosmopolitanism, and technopolitics. Exilic art practice takes myriad forms in this post-1989’s new “New World”. There are contemporary artists who are far from home, negotiating the distance between their displaced homeland and a foreign settlement. Some of whom manage to envelop their political ruins within a broader, cosmopolitical frame, tackling interconnected systematic challenges that interweave ecological, economic, and cultural knots. Other exilic artists, despite their geographic immobility, are actively practising in a politically-challenged and/or suppressed regime, mostly with limited freedom of speech. Their art goes on exile, speaking in an elusive tongue, acting without proclaiming, enacting an everyday practice that is beyond immediate descry but thrives in hindsight. This thesis asks: against the threat of instrumentalisation, what is the hope of exilic art-making that leverages on the international, almost-borderless art world in contemplating and resolving one’s political trauma? Does an increasing awareness of cosmopolitical responsibility, and the prevalence of virtual artist-activist communities constitute a new scope of hope for exilic art practice? More often than not, hope is understood against the singular, progressive, productivity-driven type of optimism that is conventionally bestowed by promises of modernity and technology. Yet, the urgency of dismantling this positivist illusion of hope is paramount in our age of new materiality, when scientific discovery and technological advancement, ideological conflicts and anthropocentric consequences have imparted us an insurmountable sense of displacement. Where is hope in this prevailing sense of hopelessness? These questions of hope do not anticipate a simple, positivist response, because the essence of hope does not concern truthfulness but offers plausibility; its efficacy lies exactly at ambiguity. Whether it is true or fake, the (in-)sincerity of hope can only be revealed after it is no longer needed, when the speculation becomes a reality. This entwinement of hope and hopelessness serves as a precarious reminder to the thesis’s desire of locating cosmopolitical neighbourhoods, revealing that the cosmopolitical reconciliation between political struggles always has one foot in an open-ended fiction. It is exactly this incompleteness which propels and motivates incessant attempts for initiating connections, practising intimacy, approaching trust.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Li, Kwan Queenie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Green, Renée

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144525

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/144525