The original meaning of subjectivity is to submit, akin to ‘lying under’ or ‘below’. Even though the Latin heritage of subjectivity involves a bottom perspective, a gaze from below, the subject in a modern understanding claims its self by way of the upper cases. The subject is marked by the big I, everyone else by small letters. This workshop returns to the pathetic heritage of subjectivity to forefront its diminutive aspects. Beyond heroic acts of mastery, the little i narrates its existence by way of everyday experiences of passivity, failure, and diminution and their foreclosed teleologies. This workshop is inspired by marginalized philosophies and epistemologies such as those developed in queer theory, Black studies, and crip theory. It invites to reimagine everyday small-scale phenomena, which not only challenge the common understanding of big life, but also allow to dream up a diminutive existence where the i is small so that the other can live large.
In English
Part I 15:00 – 16:30
Jack Halberstam
The Inconsequential – An Introduction
Angelica Stathopoulos
Milk Diary, or Alexanderplatz white, Three, two, one, contact: Alexanderplatz red
Filippo Bosco
Notes on ‘Notes’, and the Smallness of Drawing
José Segebre
On the Aesthetics of Waiting and the Wait of Șumūd
Nicolas Helm-Grovas
(subject in parentheses)
Robert Meunier
From an Empty Center to a Situated i: Lessons From an Exercise in Auto-criticism
16:30 – 17:00 Coffee Break
Part II 17:00 – 18:30
Maria Nadia Nour
A Minor Key Lullaby
Franco Costantini
The Longing of the Lark
Manuele Gragnolati
Sublunar Subjectivity: Petrarch’s Form of Inherence in Sestina 22
Line Dahler-Eriksen
Little Punishers
Carlos Kong
Our Name is Foreigner
Ewa Majewska
On Being Many and Becoming Little
With
Jack Halberstam
and
Filippo Bosco
Franco Costantini
Line Dahler-Eriksen
Nicolas Helm-Grovas
Manuele Gragnolati
Carlos Kong
Ewa Majewska
Robert Meunier
Maria Nadia Nour
José Segebre
Angelica Stathopoulos
Organized by
Angelica Stathopoulos

Heike Kabisch, Sascha, 2024; 135 × 42 × 36 cm, and Andy, 2024; 99 × 44 × 34 cm; Installation view of Memories in Deep Creeks, ChertLüdde, Berlin, 2025/ Photo by Marjorie Brunet Plaza
