menu
search

Fellowship

Fellow 2019/2020

Mijke van der Drift

Writer, educator, and performer Mijke van der Drift uses ethics as a focal point in multi-disciplinary research about social transformation. Van der Drift teaches at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam, has worked internationally on radical transfeminism, for instance at Pembe Hayat Kuirfest, Ankara, 2018; Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2016; and the London Conference on Critical Thought, London, 2015; and is co-editor of Radical Transfeminism Zine (2015–ongoing). Their current project The Logic of Loss in Bonding uses film and philosophy to formulate a counterpoint to managerial theories of accumulation. Their film A way of dying… (2017), co-directed with Alex Reuter, is touring. In addition, van der Drift is currently working on their book Nonnormative Ethics: The Dynamics of Trans Formation. They obtained a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, London. Van der Drift lives and works in Amsterdam and London.

Mijke van der Drift

Writer, educator, and performer Mijke van der Drift uses ethics as a focal point in multi-disciplinary research about social transformation. Van der Drift teaches at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam, has worked internationally on radical transfeminism, for instance at Pembe Hayat Kuirfest, Ankara, 2018; Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2016; and the London Conference on Critical Thought, London, 2015; and is co-editor of Radical Transfeminism Zine (2015–ongoing). Their current project The Logic of Loss in Bonding uses film and philosophy to formulate a counterpoint to managerial theories of accumulation. Their film A way of dying… (2017), co-directed with Alex Reuter, is touring. In addition, van der Drift is currently working on their book Nonnormative Ethics: The Dynamics of Trans Formation. They obtained a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, London. Van der Drift lives and works in Amsterdam and London.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

Mijke van der Drift’s research The Logic of Loss in Bonding conceptualizes a framework of ethics geared at reducing structural inequalities and nurturing sustainable futures. Combining philosophical exploration with film, and informed by Black, Queer, Postcolonial, and Extinction studies, this research emerges from the understanding that embracing loss, both material loss and losses of action-based and structural logics, supports ways of relearning the world. Van der Drift explores how theories of transformation that focus primarily on amending lack of access to existing forms, such as LGBT inclusion, run the risk of turning away from contemporary deteriorating environmental conditions. Centering loss can review what is perceived as lack and make space for the emergence of otherwise counterintuitive notions, such as giving up on economic growth, forms of political loss, and/or embracing a loss of material standards, as part of redistributive justice. Van der Drift further looks into the notion of loss in relationships so as to understand how making space may require a shift in one’s self as a political and ethical act. This research focuses on incorporating loss into ethics so as to dissolve the logic of domination and thus decenter an assumed necessity for control. In this aim, opening present logics to alternative ways of thinking, embracing new forms, and turning ethics to imagining open futures that are not arranged by imposition of a single order or logic.

Consent, Logic, and Loss: Fellows Intensive

In February, the BAK 2019/2020 Fellows come together for another Fellows Intensive. This week experiments with various communication practices being researched by Joy Mariama Smith and Mijke van der Drift, the BAK Fellows who co-convene this intensive along with BAK, and focuses on  consent, and logic and loss. The Fellows spend time together, share and […]

Consent and Dissolution Loss Boundaries, Rehearsing in Public with the BAK Fellows

On Wednesday 12 February 2020, BAK 2019/2020 Fellows Mijke van der drift and Joy Mariama Smith, along with BAK, co-convene a participatory panel. Along with artist Ahmed El Gendy and poet and activist Nat Raha, they rehearse in public experimental and collective practices that they are trying out in their research. The participatory panel aims to […]

Program

Related content

Isshaq Al-Barbary (Campus in Camps), Diego Segatto (Campus in Camps)

Collective Dictionary: Inhabiting

Inhabiting is an outcome of the collaboration between Al Maeishah (Isshaq Al-Babrbary, Elena Isayev, and Diego Segatto) and the Office of Displaced Designers (ODD), who invited Al Maeishah to implement their research on The Alternative Atlas of Lesvos: An Island for the World. The atlas aims to intersect with those forcibly displaced, with the global web […]

David Muñoz Alcántara, Oleksiy Radynski

Aliens, Spacetime, Storytelling, and Infrastructure: December Fellows Intensive

In December 2019 the BAK 2019/2020 Fellows gather for their third Fellows Intensive, co-convened by Fellows Oleksiy Radynski, David Muñoz Alcántara, and Diana McCarty along with BAK. Synthesizing and pushing their own and each other’s individual research trajectories, in December the Fellows visit local institutions like IMPAKT, Casco Art Institute, and Universiteitsmuseum; create and participate […]

Jeanne van Heeswijk

Three Generations of BAK Fellows Present at Propositions #10: Instituting Otherwise

BAK 2017/2018 Fellows Isshaq Al-Barbary and Matthijs de Bruijne, as well as 2018/2019 Fellow Jeanne van Heeswijk and 2019/2020 Fellow Mitchell Esajas presented and engaged in training and discussion as part of BAK’s program Propositions #9: Instituting Otherwise on 7 December 2019 at BAK, probing the question of how to institute spaces for art in […]

Luigi Coppola

Evolutionary Populations: Seeds of a World Waiting to Germinate

With the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011, agronomist and phyto-geneticist, Salvatore Ceccarelli was forced to end his 25-year research period in Syria where he had been working with local farmers experimenting with a revolutionary agricultural method that develops participatory plant breeding, a type of breeding done in collaboration with farmers to breed […]

Publications