Nottingham Contemporary

'On Doom'

Join us for a series of free monthly workshops exploring creative-critical practice, hybrid methodologies and experimental thinking.

Organised in collaboration with the Critical Poetics research group based at Nottingham Trent University, and featuring international guest speakers, the Five Bodies workshops provide a new platform for debate and collaboration for those interested in exploring the relationship between creative and critical writing.

Led by poet Johanna Hedva, this creative-critical workshop asks what might be opened because of, and through, the foreclosure of possibility. "Death, destruction, or some other terrible fate," reads the google definition of ‘doom’. In the wake of 2020 and its various catastrophes (COVID-19, the California wildfires, the U.S. election, the climate emergency), doom has asserted itself as a dominant condition. But what happens when we consider doom as generative: a beginning rather than an end? Can doom be used as a material like any other, malleable and infrastructural, decorative and common? For peoples not supported by the world's institutions of normative power, doom has already been long upon us and the world has ended many times. Think of Sun Ra,'It's After the End of the World, Don't You Know That Yet?' What comes to life within the space detonated by an event horizon? What new forms of meaning might be both annihilated and birthed by articulating doom? Is the doom/hope binary useful? ‘On Doom’ explores, through the entanglements of politics and aesthetics, how the actions of surrender, renunciation, and yielding are potentially emancipatory, how encountering the end can produce new forms of meaning for the past, present – and the future.

Our open call for the 2020-21 academic years is now closed. Join our Five Bodies monthly poetry series, where unexpected ideas, experimental drifts and multiple voices explore perceiving, sensing, feeling and knowing as knowledge-making practices.