NOT KNOWING AS PRAXIS

What does it mean to begin from not knowing?

In many academic and artistic contexts, knowledge is treated as something that must be accumulated, demonstrated, and mastered. Yet Black feminist thought reminds us that knowledge is often produced in other ways—through lived experience, embodied memory, intuition, and forms of listening, are often the conditions through which knowledge becomes possible- that exceed the limits of formal explanation. Refusing premature clarity can open space for attention, relation, and imagination.

This seminar approaches ‘not knowing as a method of artistic practice’. Rather than treating uncertainty as something to overcome, we will explore how to work with it: how questions, gaps, fragments, and intuitions can generate new forms. What happens when an idea is allowed to remain unresolved for longer? When artistic practice becomes a form of attention rather than a search for immediate answers? And when refusal—of legibility—becomes part of how knowledge is produced?

Drawing on Black feminist scholarship by thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Hill Collins, the course considers how knowledge emerges through embodied experience, speculative thinking, and quiet practices of refusal. These perspectives challenge dominant ideas of knowledge as complete, transparent, and universally accessible, and instead open space for ways of knowing that are partial, relational, and evolving.

Rather than asking us to begin with a fixed concept, or certanity, the course invites us to begin with attention: a question that has not yet found its form, a material that resists easy interpretation or meaning, a memory, sound, image, or gesture that continues to return.

By the end of the seminar, each participant will develop a - new artistic work- that emerges from these processes of inquiry. The course culminates in a group exhibition and presentation, at the end of the semester.

How might uncertainty, not knowing, become a resource rather than a limitation?

What forms of knowledge appear when we resist the pressure to already know?

And how can artistic practice hold space for what is still unfolding?