In The Thick of It : Complaint, Emotions, Institutions

Confronted with the SARS-CoV-2 crisis, we unfortunately have to cancel the 25th edition of the festival.

The mission of the festival has always been to support artistic creation, and we keep this as our core mission today. In a global crisis where the artistic community also is financially weakened, we aim to support the artists and collaborators of the festival with co-production contributions and cancellation compensations.

You can contribute to our action by buying Ghost Tickets (€10/20) or a Ghost Pass on our website until May 30th. Your help is needed. A lot of costs have already been incurred in the preparation of the festival, and we won’t be able to count on ticket incomes, nor several of our punctual subsidies.
Thanks a lot for your help and support. We are already looking forward to seeing you next year. In the meantime, take care!

____________________________________________________________________

A complaint can be an expression of grief, pain or dissatisfaction; something that is a cause of a protest or outcry, a bodily ailment or a formal allegation. Sara Ahmed explores in this lecture how the latter sense of complaint as formal allegation brings up these other more eff ective and embodied senses. Complaints can be expressed without anything even being said; they often come out “in the thick of it,” that is, right in the middle of an intense or diffi cult situation. At time of growing discussions in Brussels about power, discrimination and harassment in academic contexts, this lecture of Ahmed draws on interviews with staff and students who have made (or considered making) complaints about abuses of power within universities. Complaints teach us how “the personal is institutional.” Sara Ahmed is a scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. In 2016 she resigned from her post at Goldsmiths in protest over the alleged sexual harassment of students by staff there.