LIAS Workshop: Decolonizing Aesthetic Materials in Times of Catastrophe
21. Nov
Thursday, November 21st 2024, 10am - 7:30pm
Location: Leuphana University Lüneburg
Language: English
This event is open to everyone interested!
This workshop with academics and critics proposes to explore, from a multidisciplinary perspective, different critical strategies and decolonizing imagination to jointly develop new methods, approaches, ways of production and circulation of knowledge. We propose to open the discussion and critical study to the broad field of humanities and research in social and environmental sciences.
Topics will include: the sensitive and affective power of materials; the production, extraction and circulation of materials – from the colonial routes of "earth pigments" to the neo-extractivism of contemporary “rare earth elements”; the different histories and practices of aesthetic use of materials and their implications both in the histories of art and their technical, political and socio-environmental significances; the meanings and affects of materiality in times of ecological crisis and catastrophe; aesthetic approaches to bodily experience and non-human beings and matter.
Some of the main questions are: How are specific materials entangled with colonial ecologies and politics? What genealogies can be traced to expose the constitutive historicity of visual, sound and narrative materials from diverse geopolitical horizons? What new possibilities of thought and action can be deployed at the crossroads of the Eurocentric paradigm with the mediations, suspensions or interruptions produced from the so-called Global South?
Programme
WORKSHOP 10:00 am–1:00 pm
Paula Bertúa, LIAS Fellow and Cynthia Francica, Fellow Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), Heidelberg University (Introduction)
Campus, C5.326
Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (Leuphana University), Raphael Daibert (Leuphana University), Laura Sabel (Leuphana University), José Antonio Magalhães (ICI Berlin), Salomé Lopes Coehlo (NOVA Institute of Communication, University of Lisbon)
LUNCH 1:00 – 2:00 pm
MATERIALS IN TRANSIT
PANEL DISCUSSION 3:30–5:00 pm
Paula Bertúa, LIAS Fellow and Cynthia Francica, Fellow Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), Heidelberg University (Moderation)
“Mundus Immundus. Unworlding, Survivance, and Unspecific Aesthetics”
Jens Andermann, New York University
“Inverting the Map: The Anti-Colonial Roots (and Routes) of Modern Material”
Jordana Blejmar, University of Liverpool
‘Colonizing Institutions’: The Case of Living Matter”
Kassandra Nakas, Leuphana University Lüneburg
Campus, C5.326
DISCUSSION 5:00 – 5.30 pm
COFFEE BREAK 5:30 – 6:00 pm
PUBLIC LECTURE 6:00– 7:30 pm
“Abstraction, Processual Materiality and Identity”
Gabriel Catren, The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris | LIAS Fellow Paula Bertúa (introduction)
Campus | Lecture Hall 3
Contributors
Jens Andermann
Jens Andermann is a professor at New York University. He writes about modern Latin American arts, film, literature, architecture and material culture, and their intersections with legacies of coloniality and extractivism. He is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and the author of Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (2018), New Argentine Cinema (2011, 2015), The Optic of the State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007, 2014), and Mapas de poder. Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (2000). He taught at the University of Zurich and at Birkbeck College, London. He has been visiting professor at universities in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, and at Duke, Princeton, and Columbia.
Jordana Blejmar
Jordana Blejmar is a senior Lecturer in Visual Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Liverpool. In 2019 she co-curated with N. Fortuny the installation Tearing Up the Past at Tate Liverpool. She is an Assistant Editor of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. She is the author of Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (2017) and the co-editor of Instantáneas de la memoria: Fotografía y dictadura en Argentina y América Latina (with N. Fortuny and L. García, 2013), El pasado inasequible: desaparecidos, hijos y combatientes en el arte y la literatura del nuevo milenio (with M.E. Perez and S. Mandolessi, 2018) and Entre/telones y pantallas: afectos y saberes en la performance argentina contemporánea (with C. Sosa and P. Page, 2021).
Kassandra Nakas
Kassandra Nakas is an art historian who currently teaches at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. She was Assistant Professor and Guest Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin). Her fields of interest include art and art theory since 1800, especially the representation of the human body and the relationship between art and science. She is currently preparing a publication on artistic and medical imagery of the human body in 19th century France. She is the editor of the book Verflüssigungen. Ästhetische und semantische Dimensionen eines Topos (2015).
Gabriel Catren
Gabriel Catren is a researcher in philosophy and physics at the SPHERE Institute -Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire (Université de Paris VII-Diderot, CNRS). He was Director at the Collège International de Philosophie and also directed the European Research Council (ERC) project “Philosophy of Canonical Quantum Gravity”. His research could be framed in what, in recent years, has been called the ‘Speculative Turn’ in philosophy, which includes authors such as Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, R. Brassier, I.H. Grant, Reza Negarastani and Nick Land - some of them also members of the Cybernetic Culture Re-search Unit (CCRU). He is the author of the book Pleromatica, or Elsinore's Trance (2023).
Paula Bertùa
Paula Bertùa is Associate Professor, Chair of Literary Theory and Analysis, Department of Letters, School of Philosophy and Letters, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Currently she is a Fellow at Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and Society.
Cynthia Francica
Cynthia Francica, is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago, Chile, where she works as a researcher at the Center for American Studies (CEA), housed at the College of Liberal Arts. Currently she is a Fellow at the Fellow Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), Heidelberg University.