'Feetless Birds Die in the Air? Or Unsettlement as a Generative Condition' with Madina Tlostanova

This motif was mostly used as an expression of nonconformity with social norms and as a symbol of existential alienation—but less so in the sense of the real-life experiences of displacement and expulsion resulting from geopolitical conflicts, ethnic cleansing, neocolonial wars, and migrations caused by the Anthropocene, which are increasingly becoming an everyday reality in the present century.

Here, the restless bird takes on the form of the real exile fleeing war or climate catastrophes, particularly under the conditions of the semi-periphery in so-called “Central Eastern Europe.” This growing transversal community of restless birds is a decisive actor in shaping a future that is already dawning; their fate should be understood not only as a tragedy of non-belonging, but also as a gift of adaptability, relationality, and impermanence as a generative condition.

A Q&A will follow, moderated by Vasyl Cherepanyn (Kyiv Biennial).

Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial feminist thinker, author of fictional texts, and professor of Gender Studies at Linköping University in Sweden. Her research focuses on the epistemic and aesthetic dimensions of decoloniality, post-Soviet lived reality, literature, and art, as well as critical questions of the future and interventions in processes of complexity, crisis, and change. Her recent books include *A New Political Imagination*, *Making the Case* (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020), *Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing* (Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, Kazakhstan, 2020), and *Narratives of Unsettlement. Being Out-of-Joint as a Generative Human Condition (Routledge, 2023). She is currently working on the monograph Not by Leviathan Alone. An Exercise in Post-Nation-State Worlding.

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