Alexandra Chasin & Zishan Ugurlu: Fragments, Lists & Lacunae

Fragments, Lists & Lacunae focuses on three college students who are taking a course about gaps, holes, blanks, and white space — examples include the 18-minute gap in Nixon’s White House tapes, Sappho’s poetry, Swiss cheese, the 12 Steps, and the politics of “disappearance.” In a series of nine lectures, their professor offers multimedia provocations on absence, silence, negation, and nothingness. Meanwhile, the students’ class notes and their personal notes to each other — all projected overhead — dramatize the lived meanings of the course’s concepts. Offering this investigation into the dynamics of absence and presence, the professor is played by philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler.