Studio Practice Fall 2025: On Affordances

This course emerges from the ongoing collaboration between Valentina Desideri (artist and researcher at CAPIm) and Stefano Harney (scholar and professor of Transversal Aesthetics at KHM Cologne) as an occasion to share and experiment with their latest research on the relation between affordances and study.  

Our collaboration started when we met 14 years ago, and from different places and in different ways, came to a notion of study that has kept us company ever since. At that time, Stefano was developing the notion of study together with his long-term collaborator Fred Moten. Thinking with and through the black radical tradition in the US, they formulated study as black study a kind of common intellectual practice that is always going on in the undercommons of the University, the State and the institutions that regulate our social life. Valentina came to study through her involvement in self-education and self-organization at Performing Arts Forum (an artist run space in the north of France) and through the practice of contemporary dance. She took the intense sociality of the dance studio as a model for study, in which ideas, topics and questions could be explored collectively and transversally across their intellectual, physical, emotional and ethical dimensions. Together we wrote about fate and work, about conspiracy and social love, and now our conversation is turning towards affordances, speculating on their relationship to study and the organization of the senses.* 

We take the word affordances from the original work of social psychologist JJ Gibson, who was keen to find a more imminent relationship between ‘man’ and the environment. Gibson was interested in the perception of objects as affordances, things that made things possible (like a chair affording the possibility of sitting). However, we are trying to dispense with ‘man’ (and most especially ‘the mind’ of man apprehending affordances) in our application of the concept, and to think about affordances as offerings of/for study, as social and socializing elements we are composed of. 

Our basic premise is that study is a way to attune to affordances, and affordances are a way to think about our being outside of ‘inter-personal relations’. Rather than naming a relation between two bodies, affordances constitute the very shifting surfaces of what might be called “body” and thus allow us to think without relations. Immersed in a field of offerings (existing, possible, and virtual ones), we may think about study as a practice of tuning in with affordances, of sensing the yet unattended offerings that may host ways of existing that would not be thinkable or possible otherwise.  

This elective will devise a Studio Practice (a score for and a rehearsal of study) that will allow us to move from reading and discussing key texts on affordances, to exploring the eight senses though movement and sensing practices, in an attempt to question their hierarchical and centralized organization. 

During the sessions we will read and engage theoretical texts, in particular the original work of JJ Gibson’s work, elements of affect theory, other uses of the term affordances, and the concept of hapticality. The texts will allow us to formulate questions and ideas that we will be able to explore in conversation with each other, as well as through movement and sensing practices. We hope to create an experimental environment where theory and practice come together in a dynamic of constant revision and play. Previous knowledge of the texts (or of the knowledge-fields they address) is not required, although willingness to engage with them is. Please sign up for this elective only if you can commit to attending all the sessions.  

* Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013. 

** Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney. “Fate Work: A Conversation,” Ephemera Journal, Vol.13 n.1. 2013: 159-176. 
Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney. “A Conspiracy Without a Plot,” The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. London: Bloomsbury, 2013: 125-136. 

This course is open to HDK-Valand and KKH students.

Stefano Harney is Professor of Transversal Aesthetics at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM). He is Honorary Professor at the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, and a former Hayden Fellow at the Yale School of Art. With Tonika Sealy Thompson he runs the reading camp Ground Provisions. He is co-author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (2013) and All Incomplete (2021). He writes and teaches collaboratively and cooperatively including in a long-standing intellectual partnership with Valentina Desideri.