Adelita Husni Bey is a 2020-2022 Vera List Center Fellow, whose fellowship project, School of Pandemics, is part of the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols cycle of programs.

While acknowledging a history of supremacist segregationism expressed through notions of contagion and enmeshed in protocols of containment, Adelita Husni-Bey’s project School of Pandemics wants to extend viral, cellular, and biological metaphors towards complicity. In working across notions of expendability, necropolitics, and the ability to mourn, the proposed workshops and films will articulate the ways in which formal and informal protocols deployed in crisis can, counter-intuitively, allow for means of egress. Through the current pandemic, we have witnessed that the deployment of global responses in recognition of our entanglement are indeed possible, and that calls to abandon the most vulnerable are met with resistance through the generation of mutual aid networks. The pandemic exposes forms of quarantine imposed daily by neoliberalism, a cordon sanitaire that institutes everyday life ​in​ separation and ​in ​competition for survival. But is it not also true that quarantine, historically a form of social distancing, engenders its opposite?

Husni Bey’s temporary School of Pandemics will unfold as a series of workshops and subsequent short films. The workshops will involve New School students, who will also be protagonists in the films to address quarantine and its protocols, both those arising socially and those instituted by decree.

Adelita Husni Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, and critical legal studies. She organizes workshops, produces publications, broadcasts, and exhibition work using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, students, and teachers, the work consists of making sites to practice in collectively. Her work was part of the Italian pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2017, and her most recent solo exhibition was Chiron, New Museum, New York, 2019. She has participated in Being: New Photography 2018, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018; Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016; The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2015; Really Useful Knowledge, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, 2014; and Utopia for Sale?, MAXXI Museum, 2014.