On the 28 and 29 November Errant Journal invites you to a public research session in preparation for its ninth issue to be launched in April of 2026. This issue is guest-edited by Katia Krupennikova and looks into transregional possibilities for anti-imperial companionships. The public event with presentations by some of the contributors to this issue is aimed at building networks, to share stories of pain, joy, and deviance, and investigate how these connections can strengthen anti-colonial resistance. The editorial/imaginative centre are the regions that have experienced Russian Imperial aggression from where it makes connections across times, geographies, and ontologies to explore the radical potential of companionship.

Participants: Adriana Arroyo, Keto Gorgadze, Lesia Kulchinska, Lee Kai Chung, Samira Makki, Ana Mikadze, Petrică Mogoș, Victoria Soyan Peemot, Czyka Tumaliuan. All presentations will be in English.

Part 1
Friday 28 November, 17:00–20:00
at OBA CC Amstel, library space (Cullinanplein 1, neighbouring de Appel)

17:00 Doors open

17:30 Introducion by Katia Krupennikova and Irene de Craen

18:00: Ana Mikadze, Invisible Threads

In the 1820s, the Russian Empire imagined the South Caucasus as a source of raw materials and labour for the imperial core. Modelled after the cultivation of cotton in the American south, regional agencies promoted silk cultivation, transforming domestic practices into a punitive, extractive labour. Indigenous sericulture was industrialized and incorporated into an imperial apparatus, where silkworms, Indigenous women and women prisoners were controlled, monitored, and exploited in order to compete in European markets. Based on archival research at the Georgian National Archives in Tbilisi, this research aims to creatively trace the process of reanimating the histories of Indigenous and incarcerated women and silkworms subjected to carceral imperial labour, aiming to remember, solidarise, and form unexpected companionships across time and geographies. Just as companionship and solidarity requires co-presence and persistence, archival work demanded collaboration with the materials themselves listening to what they revealed, what they withheld, and what survived despite systematic erasure.

19:00 Samira Makki (joining online), In the Company of May: Inscription Against Incarceration

In 1936, prominent Palestinian-Lebanese writer and poet May (Mary) Ziadeh was deemed “mad” by her father’s side of the family and forcibly admitted to Asfuriyyeh, or the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders. Incarcerated in a frigid and bare room, May was denied her most sacred medium of expression, writing, until a nurse-turned-friend illicitly provided her with two pencils and some papers, and from then on, kept them coming. From Spring 1936 till Fall 1941, May wrote Layali al-Aṣfuriyyeh (Aṣfuriyyeh Nights), whose pages were scattered under the weight of its compulsory disappearance and salvaged only in 2017. This research intends to think with May’s Asfuriyyeh Nights and other women – those known, unidentified, or anonymized – that have suffered for reasons that range from expressions of sex and sexuality to matters of filial inheritance. Other than the testimonial significance of May’s diary entries, the research engages with the act of inscription proper against the pathologisation of the “non-normative” and, relatedly, the obfuscation of women’s accounts “buried in medical dossiers, under the ‘tyranny of their diagnosis'. As we build towards anti-imperial companionships, we must attend to the multifaceted violence that still haunts them, in the company of May, as well as her stifled, deferred, and sometimes, irretrievable words.

20:00 End

Part 2
Saturday 29 November, 11:30–15:00
at de Appel

11:30 Doors open

12:00 Petrică Mogoș, Musicians of the World, Unite! Politics of Friendship and Aesthetics of Non-Western Solidarity

As a renegade of the Eastern Bloc, Romania embarked on a peculiar path to building socialism — one that, despite its notorious isolationism, remained paradoxically open. The state music label Electrecord devoted special series to ethnic minorities (Roma, Tatar, Hungarian, German) and cultivated cross-national collaborations with artists from the Global South: Workers Brigade Band (Afro-Cuban jazz from Ghana, 1966), Los Guaireños (rumba from Paraguay, 1968), Tropical Fiesta (beguine from Central Africa, 1973), Pierre Pyebi-Oyubi (psychedelic space-rock from Gabon, 1980). Under the motto “Musicians of the world, unite!”, these collaborations celebrated the politics of non-Western friendship through an emerging sonic wave of internationalism. By digging into previously unexplored archival records, this research traces how material culture (vinyls, tapes, documents) intersected with politics of friendship and aesthetics of solidarity. In doing so, Petrică Mogoș seeks to reactivate erased epistemologies and reveal internationalism not as abstraction but as practice: imagined and lived, negotiated and empowering. Instead of one centre radiating outward, these collaborations shaped a network of peripheries that (re-)invented solidarities and produced hybrid sounds, images, and texts that unsettled national boundaries, challenge master narratives and open space for new understandings of transregional commons,

13:00 Lesia Kulchinska, The Dreams of the Dead

This research is a dialogue with the sculpture series Disposable Bodies by the late Palestinian artist Laila Shawa. The series was an artist’s reflection on the figure of a female suicide bomber in Palestine and the “troubling confusion of eroticisation and weaponisation” (in Laila’s words), embodied by this figure. Lesia Kulchinska looks at Laila’s piece through the lens of her own experience of the war in Ukraine, thinking of the mediatisation of death, the craving for visibility, and the relationships between vulnerable, constrained, and mortal bodies living through the war and occupation and media images produced by and extracted from them.

14:00 Lunch

Part 3
Saturday 29 November, 15:00–19:30
at de Appel

15:00 Czyka Tumaliuan (joining online), Aninaw (Ilocano: Reflection/Glimmer/Mirage)

In La Union, Philippines, survival has always been a science of listening. Fisher women mend torn nets by lantern light, whispering to the sea to grant calm for just one night. Mothers invent new rituals: tying amulets of garlic and salt to boats, humming lullabies so that children do not hear the walls groan. Each gesture is a repair, an algorithm of care passed on in fragments, mistranslations, and myths. This research proposes a speculative history: to imagine our coastline as a transmitter, a giant ear pressed against the Pacific. Through it, the voices of fisherfolk’s daughters might travel—resonating with Sámi reindeer herders, with women displaced by Russian imperial violence, with anyone whose breath is tuned to water. These transmissions are not fantasy but a way to name connections that imperial maps erase. Climate change is not a forecast but a form of aggression we already live inside — another wave in a long colonial tide. To speak of it, Czyka Tumaliuan reaches for science fiction: not to escape, but to bend time so that the women of La Union might speak with companions across oceans and centuries.

16:00 Keto Gorgadze, The Violence of Tropicalization, or Imagining Solidarities Beyond Empire

Russia never maintained enduring overseas colonies separated from the metropole by an ocean, a fact that has long contributed to obscuring its identity as a colonial empire. But it had colonised territories of the Caucasus in the subtropics that embodied climatic “otherness”. Imperial officials perceived the area as part of the tropical world, explicitly modeling their extractivist designs on Dutch and British colonies in Southeast Asia. In this sense, the framework of tropicality – the construction of regions as tropical through racialized accounts of Indigenous peoples, as was also the case in the Caucasus – can be a lens for rewriting histories of tropical violence, interweaving trans-imperial histories of domination and resistance. Tropicality however, is not only forged by imperial powers as a tool of extractivism, but also emerges as a collective sensorial regime, one capable of connecting our pasts, presents, and futures in the work of building solidarities.

17:00 Break

17:30 Victoria Soyan Peemot (joining online), Rethinking Borders in Inner Asia: From Traumas of Separation to Healing Bridges

This study offers a brief summary of Victoria Soyan Peemot's research on archival materials related to Finnish scientific expeditions in Inner Asia before 1918, along with her ethnographic fieldwork in the region from 2013 to 2025. Grounded in her positionality as a Tyva scholar at the University of Helsinki, she analyses how archival materials can contribute to rethinking colonial territorialisation and the constructed national, ethnic, and linguistic divisions among Turkic and Mongolian-speaking peoples who have long shared their homelands between the Altai and Sayan Mountains. The research focuses on the Tyva people, whose ancestral lands once constituted the northern frontier of the Qing Empire. In the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, modern state borders were introduced to this region for the first time, separating the Tyva population across three countries: Mongolia, Russia, and China. Contemporary understandings of this transnational part of Inner Asia remain largely shaped by Russian academic traditions rooted in imperial and Soviet colonial scholarship. It is crucial to broaden the scope of perspectives on Inner Asia. The Finnish research archives offer a distinct vantage point to challenge assumptions of remoteness and to recognise the violence that accompanied border demarcation and the forced displacement of kinship groups living in the newly defined borderlands. Moreover, they offer a potential bridge for healing crossborder relations strained in the 1990s by livestock theft and related violence.

18:30 Adriana Arroyo and Lee Kai Chung, Where Mountains Rest, Waters Embrace

This research moves away from a human-centric perspective, and instead draws on local cosmologies to create a space for ‘Affective Alliances’ across two distant geographies that have experienced colonial violence for centuries: the Changbai Mountains in Manchuria, and the San Juan River, at the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. This entanglement is a form of kin-making — in that we have to face and stay with troubles in common while also generating an imaginary vibration attuned to (more-than-human) bodies. Drawing from songs, folklore, myth, custom, shamanic rituals, the research fictions a mystical pilgrimage journey carried by a constellation of mythical beings, spirits and landscapes. Through maps, film stills, drawings, and photography, these more-than-human entities traverse realms inaccessible to humans, murmuring since untraceable time, slipping through territorialised borders, and inhabiting extreme environments.

19:30 End