Céline Condorelli and Avery F. Gordon, The Company We Keep

As part of her research on friendship, Condorelli has invited her friend the sociologist Avery Gordon to converse and think on the subject with her, considering the subject in relation to her own work. Avery Gordon (US) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and over the last several years, she has been writing about imprisonment, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. Gordon is also the Keeper of the Hawthorne Archives, which records the living history of a group of runaways, secessionists and in-differents who form autonomous zones and settlements and have receded from living as obedient (and also resistant or resisting) subjects.

You can listen to an audio recording of this event on the Think Tank and read Part One and Part Two of their conversation. Chisenhale Gallery will present an exhibition of new work by Céline Condorelli in May 2014, see Commissions.

Céline Condorelli (Switzerland, Italy, UK) is an artist who works with architecture; she is the author and editor of Support Structures published by Sternberg Press (2009), and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, an exhibition space in Birmingham, UK; she is currently Professor at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan.

Recent exhibitions include ‘Puppet Show’, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2013), ‘Additionals’, Pavilion, Leeds (2013), ‘The Parliament’, Archive of Disobedience, Castello di Rivoli, Italy, ‘Social Fabric’, Iniva, London and Lund Konsthall, Sweden, ‘Surrounded by the Uninhabitable’, SALT Istanbul (2012) ‘There is nothing left’, Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt and Oslo Kunstforening (2011-12), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010), ‘Revision, part 1 and 2’ (Artists Space, New York, 2009, and Cell Projects, London, 2010).

Avery Gordon (US) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2012, she was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin where she worked on a collaborative project with Ines Schaber exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13). She is the author of Notes for the Breitenau Room of The Workhouse—A Project by Ines Schaber and Avery Gordon; Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People and Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, among other books and articles. Recent scholarly publications have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Race & Class, PMLA, and other collections. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and over the last several years, she has been writing about imprisonment, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. Since 1997, she has co-hosted No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB 91.9 FM Santa Barbara. She is also he Keeper of the Hawthorne Archives, which records the living history of a group of runaways, secessionists and in-differents who form autonomous zones and settlements.