Stone Assemblies
Book Launch and Concert with Fred Moten and Brandon Lopez
Stone Assemblies is an initiative that unfolded in parallel with, but independent from, the production of Sebastia, an 800-square-meter artwork and city floor by Jumana Manna in the newly rebuilt Government Quarter in Oslo.
Where
Foyer
Price
Free entrance. No prior registration required.
About the publication and launch
Stone Assemblies brings together voices thinking through the politics of stone, ruination, and dissent. Taking the political and cultural history of extraction and land struggles in Palestine and Norway as its starting point, this volume offers a set of proposals through which the politics of stone, ruination, and dissent might be reimagined.
Through essays, poems, artworks, and conversations, the several contributors gathered in this volume critically and creatively intervene into what art, language, and the workings of culture more broadly can do in and against the nation-state’s normative terms of order: ceasefire, assimilation, disposability, and the vertical models of governance and memorialisation.
Shaped by a range of diasporic and Indigenous traditions, Stone Assemblies gestures towards an embrace of all that remains to be reassembled, renewed, and re-membered as we persist in our anti-extractivist, anticolonial practices of art and gathering.
The book launch will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Jumana Manna, Rana Issa, Drew Snyder, Mohamed Abdi, and Wendy Lotterman, and a concert with poet and theorist Fred Moten and composer and bassist Brandon Lopez, making incendiary music for a burning world.
Contributors
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Jerusalem and Berlin. Sebastia, launched in 2026, is one of the central public artworks of Oslo’s new Government Quarter.
Rana Issa is a writer, curator, translator, and pedagogue whose work spans creative, theoretical, and historical genres. She is co-founder and artistic director of Masahat for Arab Arts in Exile. She is the author of Tung tids tale(2025) and Inn ushtum ushtum (2026).
Fred Moten and Brandon Lopez live and work in New York City. Their first collaboration, Moten/Lopez/Cleaver (2022), resulted in an album, followed by The Blacksmiths, The Flowers(2024), and Revision (2025), all released by Reading Group Company. Moten is a poet and theorist, while Lopez is a composer and bassist.
Drew Snyder is senior curator at KORO – Public Art Norway, where he has developed the public art programs for Norway’s Government Quarter and the Museum of the Viking Age. He has also contributed to the institution’s curatorial and educational initiatives across Norway and Sápmi. Alongside his work at KORO, he regularly works as a writer, educator, researcher, and organizer.
Mohamed Abdi is a teacher, writer, and contributing columnist for Klassekampen, Morgenbladet, and Dagsavisen. He is co-author of Islamic Humanism (2016), Dear Brother(2018), and Ways of Seeing (2022).
Wendy Lotterman is the senior editor of Parapraxis, a magazine of psychoanalysis and left politics. In 2026–27, she is the Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley. Her first poetry collection, A Reaction to Someone Coming In, was published by Futurepoem in 2023.
