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Keynote HKW Berlin: Along, Across, and Against the Grain

Along, Across, and Against the Grain: On Spectral Densities and Margins of Play

A keynote conversation with Cécile Malaspina, Muindi Fanuel Muindi, and Sha Xin Wei

13h00 – 14h00 CET 7 November 2026 | Haus der Kunst der Welt | Berlin

What does the fertility of the void consist of? How does one pass from nothing to something, and back again, from the virtual to the actual, and from the actual to the virtual once more?

The grain of a piece of wood does not decide whether it breaks, only where and how. What if the same holds for the seeming emptiness of the void? Departing from quantum vacuum fluctuations—the momentary changes in the amount of energy in a point in space—this talk brings three thinkers together to explore different states and conditions for possibilities of becoming. Moving between philosophy, quantum physics, and Black radical thought, they ask what structures possibility, how something takes determinate form, and how individuality can be understood in relation to shared ground.

Each speaker approaches these questions from a different perspective. Cécile Malaspina reads medieval thinker Duns Scotus’s concepts of individuality (haecceitas), common nature (natura communis), and the univocity of being (univocitas entis). She inquires into this other way of understanding reality, which the onset of scientific thought occluded, and asks whether quantum mechanics today validates Scotus, challenging some fundamental scientific premises about individuality inherited from the fourteenth century. Sha Xin Wei explores how a state (of being) evolves over time through non-discrete topological dynamical systems—whereby conditions of possibility are not single ‘fixed’ positions or repeating loops but rather flow through a wider field of possibilities.

Muindi Fanuel Muindi sets the polymetric, polyphonic, and polycentric sonics of the Black radical tradition in apposition to quantum mechanics—an alternative repertoire of techniques of attunement that holds things in relation without reducing them.

This keynote results from a collective thinking practice that is the hallmark of the Indeterminacy Group and reflects ongoing conversations with its other members, Alicia Juarrero, Yagmur Denizhan, and Sonia de Jager.