#ecstaticresistance

Extract from an interview with We Who Feel Differently

Carlos Motta: Can you explain your concept of “Ecstatic Resistance”?  

Emily Roysdon: I started to use the term toward the end of LTTR when I was asked to talk about the project.  It was something I saw around me which began to represent a core set of interests in my work and the work of my peers.  A crucial part of my intellectual life is relating to the work being made around me. I am not a solitary artist so I have always had that drive to look around and ask questions. This is where the term “Ecstatic Resistance” came from. 

The idea itself is about mobilizing a vocabulary of the impossible, and the imaginary. Thinking about political representation, I located this idea and made a diagram of it, a schema where the impossible and the imaginary are two intersecting circles with struggle and improvisation as these two pyramids with movement at the core. It is all set within this field I call “the pleasure stain.” So it is about bringing this element of pleasure and performativity into resistance and thinking about plasticity, strategy and communicability, the unspeakable and telling. It is within this vocabulary of words I am playing with that I am thinking about a disruptive and destabilizing set of strategies to get beyond our limited imaginaries.

One of the examples I use to try talking about it is to think about the way the horizon of the impossible is always shifting. At one point, it was impossible to think black people would be free in America. At another, it was impossible to see women voting. Thinking about politics as a system of impossibilities, where people control the imaginary of what is possible to be, I started to think through “Ecstatic Resistance” as a force against that. The “ecstatic” is about an encounter to me; is an encounter where you get turned on just enough that your boundaries shift for a minute. I am interested in work that brings you to this place and presents an alternate reality as a possibility, works that somehow physically affect you.  

CM: Is the ecstatic encounter a personal or interpersonal encounter?

ER: I think I am positing it as a relation between, an encounter you can have with a person, an artwork, or your own self I guess. It is the encounter that addresses our concept of the other, and my desire is to position that encounter as present and ecstatic because I want it to be developmental and challenging. 




CM:  Do the politics of this schema you just described respond to a set of policies or politics out in the real world?

ER: In a way I sort of want to say no because when I think of my friends who are activists, though I’m called an activist within the art world, when I look at my friend’s lives and their investment in activism I think in a way that I can’t claim that same space but the schema is absolutely inspired by, in the service of, and indebted to those kinds of projects. “Ecstatic Resistance” is interested in the viability of lives and questions the limits of what is intelligible right now. The queer politics I am most associated with center around gender queer and trans bodies, legibility, and the regulation of rights and access to services. Still I cannot say how my project affects these things.  

CM:  How has the concept of “Ecstatic Resistance” been enacted?  

ER: It emerged as an exhibition at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, where I was given the early support to develop the project. It came to New York to X Initiative in its next iteration and I also turned it into a poster with three texts. One is mine, one is by Dean Spade and Craig Wilse and one is by Catherine Lord. 

A great example of the project is Adrian Piper’s business cards. It’s impossible to paraphrase her elegance, but on a discreet business card you pass out one side says: “I guess you don't realize that I'm black I try to not point this out because it makes white people feel like I’m bossy and I tried to assume that you're not racist until you act like it but here is notice.” The other side says: “I’m alone, I actually want to be alone, this is not a part of some larger flirtation, leave me alone,” which points towards sexual harassment instead of an insipid racism. The business cards are an incredible gesture and get to the heart of the encounter, so she is really being drawn into and in drawing somebody into a different kind of encounter relationship and acknowledgment.

From Emily Roysdon, Ecstatic Resistance, original brochure

“Ecstatic Resistance is a project, practice, partial philosophy and set of strategies. It develops the positionality of the impossible alongside a call to re-articulate the imaginary. Ecstatic Resistance is about the limits of representation and legibility—the limits of the intelligible, and strategies that undermine hegemonic oppositions. It wants to talk about pleasure in the domain of resistance—sexualizing modern structures in order to centralize instability and plasticity in life, living, and the self. It is about waiting, and the temporality of change. Ecstatic Resistance wants to think about all that is unthinkable and unspeakable in the Eurocentric, phallocentric world order.

The project is inspired by several years of witnessing and participating in projects that re-imagine what political protest looks like. And what it feels like. With one foot in the queer and feminist archives, and another in my lived experience of collectivity,i I first began to use the phrase as a way to think through all the reverberations and implications of the work I saw around me—work I was both invested in and identified with. Ecstatic Resistance became the form of my engagement, as both provocation and inspiration, challenge and context...

CONTEXT: Emily Roysdon’s Ecstatic Resistance (in reference to Norms programme)

Emily Roysdon, Ecstatic Resistance (schema), 2009