Retreat and the Politics of Escape

Programme

Keynote: Joost de Bloois - Zones of indistinction: Withdrawal as a Rogue Concept

Discussion

Break - one to one performances

Panel 1

• Dai George, Bhanu Kapil’s Retreat from the Riot
• Temenuga Trifonova, Appraisal
• Tim Beasley-Murray, Some Splashes are Bigger than Others: Retreat, Silence and Privilege in Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash
• Raquel Meseguer: A Crash Course in Cloudspotting (please bring a blanket/yoga mat if you want)
• Discussion

Break — one-to-one performances

Panel 2

• Sadhvi Dar, Residues of a Pandemic: Re-wilding AI with the Student in Absentia
• Kirstin Smith and Ali Baybutt, RETREAT: history doesn’t happen here
• Ben White, In the Grey Zone: Retreat, Commons, and Counter‑Circulation
• Antoine Bourges, States of Waiting
• Discussion

Reception

Joost de Bloois - Zones of indistinction: Withdrawal as a Rogue Concept

In Politics of Withdrawal, we investigated the political potential of gestures of desertion, exit and withdrawal: from ‘quiet quitters’ in the workplace to academic ‘quit lit’ to eco-utopias and techbro fantasies of colonizing Mars — a politics that would take leave of the political as antagonism and struggle, a politics of opting out. What emerged from Politics of Withdrawal and subsequent research is that, as a political gesture, ‘withdrawal’ seems to emerge in (or perhaps creates) a political ‘zone of indistinction’ in which different, oftentimes opposing and not entirely unproblematic ends of the political spectrum are inextricably entangled. In this talk, I’ll sketch a potential genealogy for ‘withdrawal’ as a political concept gone rogue, and some of its current illustrations.

Joost de Bloois is senior lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, and a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). His recent publications include Politics of Withdrawal (edited with Pepita Hesselberth, Rowman and Littlefield), Against the Grain: Dissent, Opposition and La parola contraria in Literature Politics and the Arts (edited with Cornelia Graebner and Jim Hicks, Edinburgh UP, and An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought: From Posthumanism to Cyberfascism (co-authored with Stijn de Cauwer and Tim Christiaens, Bloomsbury). He also co-hosts the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) podcast NICAst: https://www.nica-institute.com/nica-podcast/.

Dai George - Bhanu Kapil’s Retreat from the Riot

In his lecture Dai explores the politics of radical quietism and escape that are latent in Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015). This contemporary classic of hybrid writing dramatizes Kapil’s failed attempt to write a novel of the 1979 Southall race riots. By developing the figure of ‘Ban’, an autofictional persona for the young migrant girl caught in the maelstrom of these events, Kapil arrests this history in a work of lyric essay and bodily performance. To lift a question directly from the text, ‘A girl stops walking and lies down on a street in the opening scene of a riot. Why?’ At heart here are the aesthetic and ethical faultlines of poetry and prose, and this lecture will interrogate this dialectic by drawing a contrast between Kapil’s poetic strategies and the successful novelisation of this same history in Jacqueline Crooks’s 2023 novel Fire Rush.

Dai George is a Lecturer in Creative Arts and Humanities (Writing) at UCL. He completed a PhD in English Language and Literature at UCL in 2020 and has published a wide body of academic and popular criticism, alongside two collections of poetry with Seren. His first book of critical nonfiction is titled How to Think Like a Poet (London: Bloomsbury, 2024). He is at work on a new biography of Dylan Thomas titled Green Fuse: The Electric Lives of Dylan Thomas, which is due in 2029.

Temenuga Trifonova – Appraisal

A piece of creative writing exploring the possibility of refusing to participate in the logic of rationalisation and governmentality with its benchmarks, quality assurance audits, compliance regimes and risk taxonomies.

Temenuga Trifonova is Professor of Film Studies. She is the author of Precarity in Western European Cinema, Screening the Art World, The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema, Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime, Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, European Film Theory, The Image in French Philosophy, and the novels Tourist and Rewrite.

Tim Beasley-Murray - Some Splashes are Bigger than Others: Retreat, Silence and Privilege in Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash

This paper explores the politics of retreat through Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, a film in which a wounded rock star and her lover retreat to a Mediterranean island, only for their recuperation around a glistening swimming pool to be murderously interrupted. Tim will suggest that the film’s (incidental, inadvertent) portrayal of migration, as a backdrop to the main drama, highlights tensions between retreat and engagement, (racialised) privilege and inequality. Drawing on Toni Morrison’s “unspeakable unspoken,” Tim will argue that A Bigger Splash reveals the local and global complexities of retreat, inviting us to consider the consequences of our own silences and withdrawals.

Tim Beasley-Murray works on literature and ideas across a range of European languages. He has recently published Critical Games: On Play and Seriousness in Academia, Literature and Life. His current project addresses the ambient unspoken. In collaboration with Peter Getlík, a Slovak filmmaker and academic, Tim is currently working on an essay film that, using this material inter alia, explores spaces of play and retreat and the relationship between figure and ground.

Raquel Meseguer: A Crash Course in Cloudspotting

In 2016 Raquel (accidentally) set off a security alert by lying down on the top floor of the Southbank centre, London. Since then, she has collected over 300 stories about disabled and chronically ill people’s attempts to rest in public. A Crash Course in Cloudspotting tells some of these stories. Raquel will invite you to engage in a collective act of rest and to consider the view from the horizontal as you listen to some of the Cloudspotting stories. The invitation is to experience how words and stories might land differently when you are at rest.

Raquel’s work straddles theatre, dance, installation, performative conversations and photo-documentary. In 2016 she founded Unchartered Collective to create theatrical encounters that explore the lived experience of disability. Her project A Crash Course in Cloudspotting is an installation & performance, an app, and a digital archive. She is currently developing a new full-length work entitled full Proper Time. Raquel was a founding member of Lost Dog Dance and was Associate Artist on Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) and Juliet + Romeo. In 2023 she was nominated for an Olivier Award for her Dramaturgy on Lost Dog’s Ruination. Raquel was movement director on Rachel Bagshaw’s The Shape of the Pain and Amy Hodge’s Mother Courage. Raquel was Co-Artistic Director of Candoco Dance from January 2024 - July 2025.

Sadhvi Dar - Residues of a Pandemic: Re-wilding AI with the Student in Absentia

In this presentation, Sadhvi will share her recent work on post-Covid student absence from university lecture rooms. She argues that this great absence represents collective refusal of the ‘avatar-self’ that digital capitalism demands of students in a fully-digitalized university environment. This digital environment is entangled with ‘avatarism’, a process that uses Virtual Learning Environments to compress students into data subjects. These platforms function as digital plantations, converting embodied learners into behavioural data points. Covid-19 accelerated this domestication, providing justification to normalise surveillance technologies as pedagogical innovations. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenic principle, which describes the racial-gendered mechanisms determining who counts as fully human, Sadhvi will position student absence as epistemic disobedience against educational technologies serving capitalist extraction rather than liberation from de-humanising technologies.

Dr. Sadhvi Dar is Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Global Management. Her research and scholarship have contributed to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies traversing critical management studies, decolonial studies, postcolonial studies, feminisms of colour and Black studies. Throughout her academic career spanning almost two decades, she has been engaged with questions of race, gender and embodiment as these intersect with knowledges, community, and everyday acts of resistance. Working in the margins of these intersecting fields, she has published on international development, organisational processes (e.g., reporting, accountability, governance), universities, student protest and liberatory movements more generally.

Kirstin Smith and Ali Baybutt - RETREAT: history doesn't happen here

start to have just you backwards walk can anyone present political your about me tell and hand my hold sinking they're and still standing they're us beneath moving is ground the perhaps or walking we're were you thought you where going not you're but walking you're

Dr Kirstin Smith is a Lecturer in Creative Arts and Humanities: Performance Studies at UCL, focused on dramaturgy, casting, and highly theatrical acts in daily life. Recent work includes a co-edited special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance on casting and identity. Her 2019 monograph analyses the emergence of stunts in public life.

Alexandra Baybutt (PhD, RSME, CMA, FHEA) works as an artist, educator and researcher in the UK and internationally since 2004. She works on/with/through space - cultural, cellular, cosmic. www.alexandrabaybutt.co.uk

Ben White - In the Grey Zone: Retreat, Commons, and Counter‑Circulation

This audio‑visual presentation explores retreat as a grey zone between ownership and the commons, withdrawal and circulation. Drawing on practice‑based work with Open Music Archive, Ben considers how radical openness, copyleft, and collaborative archiving can generate practices centred on commoning and interdependence rather than competition and exclusion. Far from disappearing from circulation, this retreat moves into alternative modes of free sharing and reuse, proposing counter‑circulation to resist both competitive exclusion on the one hand, and the extractive abundance of platform economies and generative AI on the other.

Ben is an artist and practice‑based researcher with an international reputation for innovative work in archival art practice. His work brings together computational processes, relational modes of collaboration, and artists’ sound and moving‑image practice to explore the creative potential of public domain materials. He develops novel methods for archival practice that enrich rather than deplete the public domain, with a focus on peer‑to‑peer distribution and co‑creation with communities. Ben collaborates with artist Eileen Simpson (and Reader in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art) on Open Music Archive, an ongoing project that sources, distributes, and reanimates out‑of‑copyright sound and film and a vehicle to replenish the commons for future use and reuse.

http://www.openmusicarchive.org/work

Antoine Bourges - States of Waiting

Antoine will screen his film WOMAN WAITING, which follows a woman as she moves between a temporary place of refuge, a housing office, and the spaces she uses to get through the day. It considers the possibilities for rest and moments of pause while facing economic precarity.

Antoine Bourges is a Paris-born filmmaker and educator working between documentary and fiction. His practice focuses on social precarity, institutional life, and the textures of everyday experience, often in collaboration with non-professional performers.

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