Following creative research developed for the project Party Studies, Brandon LaBelle will offer perspectives on parties as creative get-togethers. This includes a consideration of wreckage as fundamental to parties: from bodily exuberance and breakdown to collective rapture, parties are highlighted as anarchic worldings prone to excess and intensities of felt-experience, a being-with-with, and which oscillate unevenly between hospitality and aggression, love and pain. Furthermore, the party is adopted as an epistemic location, where revelry is captured as a knowledge practice: to relish the night, to collaborate with all types of matter, to exhaust oneself through radical (un)doing. What does the party teach us? And how to carry the party with us, back into the daylight? Partying will be considered, following Harney and Moten, as a form of study, as what generates passionate discovery, where knowledge production is equally anti-production, a breaking-down, non-knowledge, leading to what Georges Bataille calls Happy Tears. Together we’ll reflect upon these perspectives, thinking in what ways festivity may act as a general ethic. 

ABOUT BRANDON LaBELLE

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-21), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), among others.