Killing me Softly, Ageing, Music, AffirmationKilling me Softly, Ageing, Music, Affirmation

Reading Room lecture with philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti. She is a Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University.

Contemporary culture celebrates eternal youth, while showing the highest disregard for all living entities, human and non-human. Advanced capitalism is a brutal, unsustainable system that consumes everything it touches and erodes the very foundations on which it is built. Many people, species and cultures are dying today, on our very damaged and divided planet. And yet, we lack a suitable language and methodology to deal with the ageing and dying process in our times. This lecture explores affirmative experiments with ageing through the work of a number of popular singers: Joni Mitchell, Marianne Faithful, Barbara and Aretha Franklin. How does affirmative ethics help us deal with contemporary ways of ageing and dying?

This event is part of Het Nieuwe Instituut's long-term research on burn-out. The initiative addresses the exhaustion of a growing number of human and other bodies, as a symptom of the presence of exploitative structures within society, throughout institutional, political and biological ecologies.

The Reading Room is a series of evenings dedicated to the act of collective reading. It is a place to decipher and interpret the world with its countless languages and systems, including phenomena that by their ubiquity evade investigation. Led by an artist, researcher or designer, a small audience will reflect upon a concept, a text, an object or an image. The Reading Room is a space for intimate, provocative conversations. It is a place for creative confusion and sometimes even frustration, in which speakers and audience are not looking for concrete solutions but for higher resolutions. Subjects in previous Reading Rooms include exhibition, surveillance, migration, liquidity, museum, insecurity.

Before the Thursday Night you can grab a bite to eat with the speakers and staff of Het Nieuwe Instituut. At 18:00 Het Nieuwe Café will serve a light vegetarian meal. Dinner vouchers are available for ¬ 7.70 up to a day before the particular Thursday Night event via the Tickets link.

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