‘Queer furnishing’: Performative (re-)orientations in ethics and aesthetics

At the intersection of aesthetics in philosophy and philosophy in aesthetics, my article takes specific situations and their concrete settings into consideration. It no longer asks what appears and is experienced but how and in what way something appears and is experienced as something. Its phenomenological focus highlights the lived body’s resourcefulness as a point of passage for ethical observations of its movements towards the world, in experiencing between intention and execution, in understanding the correspondence between what is aimed at and what is given and in dealing with others and things. Examples of this are a desk and a chair in a feminist’s life, a pair of scissors in a bodily experience and a caravan and a calliope in Kara Walker’s installation The Katastwóf Karavan in collaboration with Jason Moran on the slave trade in historic New Orleans, all leading to performative (re-)orientations in ethics and aesthetics through their use by following the concept of a ‘queer furnishing’ as suggested by Sara Ahmed to disrupt and reorder what has already been arranged and thereby linking it directly to social and political questions about race, gender and sexuality.