While knowing might allude to a certain mastery, an illusion of control or an ability to order—catastrophe implies a collapse and an absence of being able to continue. We live in a world that assumes that data—the overwhelming assembling of information—allows us a measure of knowing, of having insight or just being able to navigate events that harbor catastrophic consequences: rising oceans and temperatures, genocidal wars, unopposed authoritarianism and redundant human resources.
But data hardly gives us insight or provides us with ways of living out catastrophe. For that we need to look elsewhere—both for other sources of that knowledge and other ways of inhabiting the catastrophes that surround us.
If we accept that knowledge rages, acquiesces, surrenders—that its volatility matches the realities it is tracking, we might have another register at which to live out catastrophe. In this keynote, Irit Rogoff explores the modes of knowing catastrophe and the ways of living with it that are made possible through alternative creative and artistic pathways into knowledge—pathways that eschew resistance in favor of active imaginations and the potential of criticality.

2025