Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection

Plenary Contributors

The fifth PARSE biennial artistic research conference from 15–17 November, 2023 at the Artistic Faculty, University of Gothenburg, Sweden will explore the scope of love in its meanings and manifestations. From its occidental institutionalisation to its transformative potential as expressed in wider cultural contexts, the conference will engage with modes of art making, literary practices and scholarship with a focus on love as enchantment, as an entangled power in politics, as friendship, as eros, as intimacy, as queer potentiality and as disaffection.

Violence

Plenary Contributors

Violence is (a) sensitive matter. Intensive and consuming. A fact of life, and yet heavily fictioned. For some, it is a human universal, embedded and affecting; shaping history, delimiting social structures and even determining planetary fate. Contrastingly for others, violence is itself this universalizing discourse of colonial-modernity. For some violence exposes injustices and asymmetries. It is in the utterance and resistance of the oppressed. Others construe violence as the essential logic of all relations, the foundation of the social. While violence may pervade the lived experiences of all, it surely does so in ways that are differentiated in valency, intensity and outcome.   

Human

Plenary Contributors

Politically, culturally and theoretically, it is impossible today to navigate through the dense lattice of emergencies and urgencies without addressing the question of what constitutes the human, inhuman, subhuman and non-human, as well as formulating an adequate response to the anthropocenic threat posed by the human against the planet. As such, the Human conference intends to prompt an interdisciplinary and international debate on key issues of the contemporary global condition.

Exclusion

Plenary Contributors

How does exclusion operate at a local, national and international level in the arts, in education and in cultural production? Within the arts, how can we improve access to learning and the formation of experience? Within and beyond the field of cultural production, individuals and groups of people are excluded from territorial, subjective, environmental and imaginative spaces, be they national, institutional, or virtual. How do images of exclusion circulate? What are the politics of access? What forms of research and which actions can be taken within the artistic and pedagogical environment that may open and provide spaces of contact and forms of rights?

Time

Plenary Contributors

Time arguably has always been at the center of the research initiatives of the natural sciences, of philosophy and of the many different practices of history and social criticism. However, time also occupies a central place for the curiosity and attention of artist researchers across all the arts. The intensification of the question of time has, in recent years, prompted some to speak of a “temporal turn” across the disciplines. This conference seeks to bring together a range of researchers, drawn mainly from the artistic fields but also inviting researchers from across all disciplines to consider questions with respect to the practices, processes and perturbations of time.

PARSE 10th Anniversary

Since its establishment as a publishing platform for artistic research, PARSE has successfully launched 18 issues with over 270 contributions, hosted numerous seminars and workshops and organised 5 conferences in its 10-year existence. To mark its contribution to interdisciplinary art practices PARSE will host a symposium from 25 to 26 April 2024 to celebrate its anniversary.