Alexandra Chasin and Zishan Ugurlu’s Fragments, Lists & Lacunae focuses on three students taking a college course about gaps, holes, white space, and blanks—course content ranges from Mad Libs to the 18-minute gap in Nixon’s White House tapes, from Sappho’s poetry to contemporary politics of “disappearance,” from Genesis to extinction. In a series of nine lectures, their professor, played by Judith Butler, offers multimedia provocations on absence, silence, negation and nothingness, while the students’ class notes and personal notes to each other, dramatize the lived meanings of the course’s concepts. Projected overhead, the students’ live writing adds detail to the relationships between them, and supplements the audio-visual material presented in the lectures, for a real spectacle. The world premiere of Fragments, Lists & Lacunae was presented by New York Live Arts in February 2020.
