Cite as: Julian Isenia, ‘Read Mi Like a Song: A Grammar of Redaction’, talk presented at the panel 1: ‘gaps’ of the conference Minima Formalia, ICI Berlin, 20 May 2026, video recording, mp4, 27:19 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260520_03>
Talk
20 May 2026

Read Mi Like a Song

A Grammar of Redaction
By Julian Isenia

Video in English

Format: mp4
Length: 00:27:19
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/minima-formalia/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Conference

Minima Formalia: Minor Details and Empty Gestures

This conference takes an interest in minutiae at the levels of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. It invites smaller-scale perspectives to interrogate the interrelations between form and content, and asks how aesthetics forms theory and how theory performs politics. Gravitating around those details that are often seen as inconsequential and unimportant, this conference gestures towards alternative ways of imagining and enacting form, performance, and the formless. Through the lenses of dust, drops, and gaps, reality looks different—blurred, unclear. Minima Formalia asks what role details play in understanding or altering our worldview, and whether one can make a grammar of small or empty gestures. Is the small, the unknown, the overlooked by definition better or more interesting than the big, the known, the noticed? Or does the devil lie in the details?

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Antonia Baehr
Alvina Chamberland
Rebecca Comay
Nile Davies
Jule Flierl
Julian Isenia
Esther Leslie
Natascha Sadr Haghighian

Organized by

Nicolas Helm-Grovas
Jasmine Pisapia
Angelica Stathopoulos
Verónica Stedile Luna
ICI Berlin