上海外滩美术馆 Rockbund Art Museum

“杂乱之物”是一场由坎迪斯·威廉姆斯（艺术家、卡珊德拉出版社创始人）和朱筱蕤（上海外滩美术馆馆长及首席策展人）共同策划的非常规会议。这场“思想库”项目为期四天，搭建出透明的工作空间和集体研究领域，开启一段根植于黑人研究、中国革命思想和离散知识形式的教学赋格。活动由上海外滩美术馆主办，并在上海及周边城镇举行。参与者将追溯殖民历史中的无声向量：商人、慰安妇、被奴役者、派遣劳工和知识分子的沉默构成了全球资本、种族与灵性主义在概念、象征和物质层面的流动。

选择在上海举办这场具有历史意义的会议，其核心不在于文化定位，而是战略性地干扰定向。在这座殖民现代性、社会乌托邦主义和推想未来主义相碰撞的城市，“杂乱之物”拒绝将亚非团结视作怀旧的形象或隐喻；相反，迎接“杂乱之物”的上海是一个知识论碰撞的场域，一个在压力环境下机构框架崩塌而新的学习形式得以诞生的场所。城市的文化面貌愈加受到加速主义、民族主义和全球化政策的影响。在这种环境下，跨国团结并非易事。

与传统的研讨会或讲座系列不同，这个思想库希望召集艺术家、作家和学者参与的，是一场关于注释、拒斥、朗读、驳论和共同学习的实验性论坛。“思想库”拒绝攫取式的知识模式，更看重多元文化的杂乱而非和谐，直面断裂、无知、政治情绪、矛盾、破碎、愉悦和漂移。“杂乱之物”是坎迪斯·威廉姆斯与朱筱蕤继2022年在牙买加金斯顿为纽约古根海姆美术馆策划之后的第二次合作。威廉姆斯与朱筱蕤共同构建了一个生动的框架，致力于挑战离散话语在全球机构中的平面化。

两人此次合作的“杂乱之物”聚焦“亚非”这一词语近期的复兴，探索第三世界主义的再度协商，以及离散崩溃、政治统一和假想联盟的政治时刻——例如1959年W. E. B. 杜波依斯（W. E. B. Du Bois）与毛主席握手的标志性照片。这张照片由作家、政治人物郭沫若安排：我们看见的不仅是两位政治领袖，而是两位持续想象激进团结的行动者。以这些社会政治场景为起点，我们拥抱这些张力，相信新的空间能从这些摩擦中诞生，接纳我们反思黑人激进主义的诗学、虚构与幻想，其与国际团结的整合，以及在经济与帝国维度的缠结。正如艺术史学家琼·基（Joan Kee）指出：“思考‘离散’这一术语所带来的困难，能够促使我们反思一种不受‘分散各地’的叙事所支配的归属模式。”

尽管黑人研究常常被表面化、私有化或干脆抹除，“杂乱之物”坚信由黑人主导的美学与思想框架能够在“理性”概念之外，将反黑人主义刻画成一种在机构空间内治理的分散状态。“杂乱之物”的概念架构由卡珊德拉出版社塑造，灵感来自特洛伊预言女神卡珊德拉——一位遭受诅咒而注定无人相信的灾难与启示女神。这一形象描绘了卡珊德拉出版社的核心使命：放大那些在主流文化与学术正典中被忽视、误读或抹除的声音。卡珊德拉的方法论融合了伦理与美学，黑人主导的探索介入对话、大众媒体、共同的悲痛、艺术张力和集体学习的激进分配方式。在这里，学习不仅是政策或展览的前奏，而是一种生活实践，重视思想在人与人之间展开时的杂乱无章：在对话中、在分歧中、在信仰中、在文本的边缘。威廉姆斯与朱筱蕤的策划援引亚非美学，将其视作一种不透明、矛盾和过剩的场所，拒绝提供固定的结论。

在“杂乱之物”中，参与者受邀在不确定性中停留——或正如理论家丹尼斯·费雷拉·达·席尔瓦（Denise Ferreira da Silva）所称，“在极限处思考”。“杂乱之物”并不追求生产力层面的效率至上，而更看重无序与中介状态：小调音符、半擦除的图示、随意的评论、未完的引文。这些对话不会迎来确凿无疑的结论，而将会在项目后续以出版物的形式继续进行——既是一件接纳在混乱中共生的容器，也是一份始终流动的档案。

参与者：朱筱蕤、坎迪斯·威廉姆斯、埃里克·麦克、萨拉·里夫基、奥涅卡·伊圭、克里斯汀·王、陶·利·戈夫、埃米莉·梅梅·罗丝、克洛艾·斯旺森、赵刚、王拓、本吉·拉、孙遇洲、陈玺安、44月报（冯俊华、潘赫、江萌）、谭鸿钧、琼·基、夏洛特·张、博兹·加登、彭祖强

Messy Things is an unconventional conference co-developed by Kandis Williams (artist and founder of publishers Cassandra Press) and X Zhu-Nowell (Director and Chief Curator, Rockbund Art Museum). This four-day “think bank” operates as a transparent workspace — a collective field of study, a pedagogical fugue grounded in Black study, revolutionary Chinese thought, and diasporic forms of knowledge. Hosted by the Rockbund Art Museum and taking place in different sites in Shanghai and nearby towns, Messy Things will enable participants to trace the silent vectors of colonial history — the silences of the merchant, the comfort woman, the enslaved, the indentured, the intellectual — which structure global flows of capital, race, and spiritualism on conceptual, symbolic and material levels.

Hosting this historical gathering in Shanghai is not about cultural placement but about strategic disorientation. In a city where colonial modernity, socialist utopianism, and speculative futurism collide, Messy Things refuses to treat Afro‑Asian solidarity as a nostalgic image or metaphor. Instead, it reads Shanghai as a terrain of epistemic collision, a place where institutional frameworks collapse and new forms of study become possible under pressure. The city’s cultural landscape is increasingly shaped by acceleration, nationalism, and policy-driven globalization. In that context, transnational solidarity is not easily claimed.

Eschewing the formality of a symposium or lecture series, Messy Things is a gathering that convenes artists, writers, and scholars in an experimental forum of annotation, refusal, reading aloud, writing against, and study-in-common. This “think bank” resists extractive models of knowledge, instead privileging the mess over multicultural harmony, and moving towards rupture, unknowing, political feeling, contradiction, incoherence, pleasure and drift. Messy Things is the second collaboration between Kandis Williams and X Zhu-Nowell, following their 2022 convening in Kingston, Jamaica, organized for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Together, they have constructed a living framework that insists on challenging the terms by which diasporic narratives are flattened within institutions.

This second iteration of their collaboration, Messy Things focuses on the recent revitalization of interest in the term Afro‑Asia, exploring renegotiations of Third Worldism and the political moments of diasporic collapse, political unification, and imagined alliances, such as the iconic image of W.E.B. Du Bois and Mao Zedong shaking hands in 1959. This photograph, staged by writer and political figure Guo Moruo, reminds us that we are not merely looking at two political leaders but at actors within an ongoing cultural imaginary of radical solidarity. We take these socio-political stagings as a starting point — embracing these tensions as generative frictions, offering a space to reflect on the poetics and fictions and fantasies of Black radicality, its integration into international solidarities, and economic and imperial entanglements. As art historian Joan Kee notes, “Thinking about the difficulties posed by the term diaspora prompts reflection on models of belonging not governed by dispersion.”

While Black studies are often tokenized, privatized, or erased – Messy Things insists on Black-led aesthetic and intellectual framings that can both describe and de-rationalize forms of anti-blackness as a dispersion of governance within Institutional spaces. The conceptual architecture of Messy Things is shaped by Cassandra Press, invoking the mythological figure of Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess of ruin and clarity, cursed to be disbelieved. This figure informs Cassandra Press’s foundational mission: to amplify voices ignored, misread, or erased from dominant cultural and academic canons. Cassandra’s methodology fuses ethics and aesthetics — where Black-led inquiry meets radical distributions through dialogue, popular media, shared grief, artistic friction, and collective study. Here, study is not a precursor to policy or exhibition; it is a life practice that values the messiness of thought as it unfolds between people: in conversation, in disagreement, through belief and in the margins of texts. Williams and Nowell’s curation is one that uses the aesthetic terrains of Afro-Asia as a site of opacity, contradiction, and excess, offering no fixed outcomes.

Throughout Messy Things, participants are invited to dwell in the indeterminate — what theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva might call “thinking at the limit.” Messy Things is not optimized for productivity; rather, it privileges the disorganized and the interstitial: the minor note, the half-erased diagram, the off-hand comment, the citation without closure. In lieu of fixed conclusions, these dialogues will continue in the form of an adaptive publication in the aftermath of the event, a container for the being-together and staying with disorder — a document in a constant state of flux.

Participants: X Zhu-Nowell, Kandis Williams, Eric N. Mack, Sarah Rifky, Onyeka Igwe, Christine Wang, Tao Leigh Goffe, Jodie Sun, Emily Mei-Mei Rose, Khloe Swanson, Zian Chen, Wang Tuo, Bhenji Ra, John Tain, Zhao Gang, Joan Kee, and Peng Zuqiang.

About Cassandra Press

Founded by Kandis Williams in 2016, Cassandra Press is an artist-led publishing and pedagogical platform committed to the distribution of Black critical thought through lo-fi readers, artist zines, experimental classroom formats, and performative research. Over the past decade, the press has released more than 40 readers, hosted public study groups and classroom intensives, and launched artist zine collections with contributors like Hannah Black, manuel 2breu2 2breu, and Christine Wang; built public and online libraries, readings rooms and hosted spaces for radical epistemic and emotional inquiry to thrive. Cassandra Press’s methodology privileges Black scholarship not as fixed content, but as a mode of relation: a site of critical intimacy, interruption, and revolutionary imagination.