***

Love Is Strong As Death

subRosa’s work is both site and situation specific—an art of social relations and discursive participation. We are deeply influenced by different feminist traditions of hosting, hospitality, collaborative cooking, mutual nourishment, friendship and consciousness-raising as sites for critical conviviality.

Lately, subRosa has been thinking about the economies of exchange between teachers and students. Those of us who teach and study in institutions of higher education must often contend with extremely high tuition costs, exhausting workloads, student debt, exploitation of part-time instructors, inequality of treatment of support staff, faculty burn-out, and feelings of political and economic oppression (and depression) caused by capitalist pedagogical economies. How can academic workers maintain ethical and generous relations of knowledge-sharing and creative production under such circumstances? How can we nourish each other and create critical friendships and networks of support across differences? How can our teaching and learning become part of the ground for intellectual, creative, and embodied lives worth living? How can we recharge and sustain ourselves and each other to circumvent the burn-out that resistance to unjust and commodified relations often produces? How can academic/knowledge workers create autonomous communities inside and outside the strictures and structures of bureaucratized education? Who owns our teaching and student power? We invite you to address these and other questions through discourse, song, poetry, and toasts at the open mike at any time during the feast.

Due to space limitations and our commitment to the process of this performance, we have come to the difficult decision to limit the number of participants. Though this decision is in some ways contradictory to the spirit of hospitality in our work, our desire is that you will gain nourishment from the experience, which will help you sustain in some small way, your life’s work and its connection to others.

subRosa took the title of this project from a clock tower at Brown University, the site of our inaugural Convivial Feast. The tower was erected in honor of Carrie Brown, granddaughter of the University’s namesake. The (mostly male) founders and presidents of Brown have always been supported by the conviviality and affective labor of women such as Carrie, to whom the clock tower is dedicated with the inscription “Love is Strong as Death” (after Song of Solomon). subRosa hopes to re-cast the site-u-ational meaning of this tower inscription with new & historic manifold possibilities.

[… home …]