FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON FAMILY ABOLITION
A talk by Sophie Lewis
Wed 16 March 2022, 7 p.m.

 

Via ZOOM
Language: English

Family abolition is a charged phrase which often prompts the impulsive answer “But I love my Family!” With Sophie Lewis we will discuss what is meant by family abolitionism, what it has to do with love and collective care, why we should abolish the family, and its utopian vision. Sophie Lewis will also reflect on what does family abolition mean in political contexts where the Indigenous, minoritarian and racialised family is always already pre-abolished.

Please register under the following link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtf-2qqD8vGtDgRqgc8_lzRJBHYNh9Sjeu
After registration you will receive an excerpt from Sophie Lewis’ upcoming book Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, which will also form the basis for the session. Prior reading is recommended. The talk will be followed by a discussion.

Sophie Lewis is a writer living in Philadelphia, teaching courses on feminism, utopian theory, and anti-work politics at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her essays - on subjects ranging from domestic labor to trans liberation to octopus eros - have been published in academic journals such as Signs and Feminist Theory as well as non-academic ones such as Boston Review, The New York Times, n+1 and The London Review of Books. Sophie studied English Literature and subsequently Environmental Policy at Oxford University, followed by Politics at the New School for Social Research and Human Geography (for her PhD) at the University of Manchester. She is now a Visiting Scholar at the Alice Paul Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and tweets at @reproutopia. Her first book was Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso Books, 2019) and her second, forthcoming in October 2022, will be Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso Books and Salvage Editions).

The event is part of Temporary Gallery’s study group Forms of Kinship. The series of gatherings aims to think collectively about the way we form relations in and with the world, outside of the nuclear family structure. The meetings take place monthly, online. Each session is led by an invited guest, including artists, thinkers, poets, activists and others. The study group is convened by Aneta Rostkowska (CCA Temporary Gallery) and Kris Dittel (independent curator).

Image
Sophie Lewis, 2019, photo credit: Christopher Leaman

Funding and support
Temporary Gallery receives structural funding by the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne and Deltax contemporary, Wirtschafts- und Steuerberatungsgesellschaft mbH.

The event is part of a larger endeavor called "Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions”, in which CCA Temporary Gallery works with six international partner institutions: Jindrich Chalupecky Society (Prague), Latvian Center for Contemporary Art (Riga), Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki), Julius Koller Society (Bratislava), Faculty of things that can't be learned (Skopje) and Stroom den Haag (The Hague). Islands of Kinship is co-funded by the EU Program Creative Europe.