Rasanblaj as Spirit Turn: Gina Athena Ulysse in Conversation with Jennifer González

@ Please join us for a conversation between Gina Athena Ulysse and Jennifer González, discussing Ulysse’s solo exhibition Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements. Gina Athena Ulysse (b 1966) Haiti/United States is an artist-scholar, Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Rasanblaj Praxis Project Lab (RPPL) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Concerned with the visceral in the structural, her questions engage geopolitics, historical representations, aesthetics and the spiritual in the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions. In the last two decades, her rasanblaj approach (the gathering of ideas, things, people, and spirits) to her multidisciplinary art and writing practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She has performed at The British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Cabaret Voltaire, Gorki Theatre, House of World Cultures, LaMaMa, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, MoMA Salon, among other venues. She has held residencies at the University of Buffalo, Oregon State, University of Zurich, as well as the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in Italy. In 2020, she was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney. In 2024, she was invited to participate in the Biennale de Dakar. She is a 2025 MacDowell fellow. Her major publications include the forthcoming A Year and A Day. Leonore Mau and Haiti (Oct 2025, editor with Dora Imhoff and U5), a polyphonic inquiry into the photographs Leonore Mau (1916-2013) took in Haiti during the 1970s; Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (2015); Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017) – long-listed for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award and recipient of the 2018 Best Poetry Connecticut Center for the Book Award – and  A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics(2023). She was the invited editor of e-misferica’s Caribbean Rasanblaj (2015), the Hemispheric Institute’s Journal for Performance and Politics. Her visual art has appeared on the covers of Feminist Formations, Feminist Studies, Frontiers, and Meridians Journals. Jennifer Gonzalez Jennifer González writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation, digital and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender. González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Archives of American Art Journal, ...