(Cancelled) KEYNOTE: ‘Fashioning a Tool—de/re/composition’ by Denise Ferreira da Silva

We regret to announce the cancellation of our Keynote and Masterclass programs with Denise Ferreira da Silva set to take place this Friday November 10. Together with our presentation partners Blacker Blackness, we extend our apologies for this unforeseen cancellation. Please stay tuned for further programs coming up this winter via our website, newsletter, and on social media.


Join us for a KEYNOTE with Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva, delving into her latest book Unpayable Debt published in 2022 by MIT and Sternberg Press. The lecture, titled ‘Fashioning a Tool - de/re/composition’, addresses the character of Dana from Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred. Through the narrative image of time-travel, Ferreira da Silva re-visits the racial composition of time, and questions the true form of social and political change.

With this program, Kunstinstituut Melly launches the online chapbook of the Tools for Demodernizing initiative. The chapbook compiles reflections, bibliographic notes, and correspondent reports from the Tools for Demodernizing program that took place in June 2023 at Kunstinstituut Melly. This event brought together an international network focused on making transformative and sustainable changes in art institutions today. An event launching the chapbook in Paris will be held on October 21 in partnership with the Palais de Tokyo.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a scholar and artist renowned for her powerful theoretical interventions into the ethico-political challenges of the global present. Building on her previous work, in Unpayable Debt Ferreira da Silva revisits Dana’s time-travel between the slave plantations of the American South and California of the 1970s as a way of understanding the racial politics of the 2007-8 global financial crisis and its aftermath.

This event is co-presented by Kunstinstituut Melly and Blacker Blackness. The Keynote program, with Q&A, will host dialogues led by Artist and Spatial practitioner Ola Hassanain questioning what the material conditions are under which we can establish community. A question rooted in her teachings of study sessions of Blacker Blackness, an education program initiated by writer Simone Zeefuik. Hassanain is joined by Zeefuik in conversation with Denise Ferreira de Silva.

Unfortunately this event is sold out. Due to extremely popular demand, it will be livestreamed on our YouTube Channel.

Tools for Demodernizing is supported by Terra Foundation for American Art.