Aesthetics

Adela Goldbard Towards a Poetics of Violence: Since that’s the only way they listen to us

My proposed artist talk analyses my recent art project “Kurhirani no ambakiti (burning the devil): since that’s the only way they listen to us” using as framework my developing Poetics of Violence: an interdisciplinary research-practice that aims to revert hegemonic narratives of violence and to delegitimize the monopoly of violence, proposing instead, after Franz Fanon, that “violence, like Achilles’ spear, can heal the wounds it has inflicted” and that “decolonization is always a violent event”. The Poetics of Violence proposes that the aesthetic potential of violence, once torn from the dominant and colonizing discourse, can become a powerful tool for epistemic decolonization and liberation. On April 5th 2017, more than 300 elements of Michoacán state police repressed and attacked the Purépecha community of Arantepacua using police cars, trucks, helicopters and a ‘rhinoceros’ armoured tank. After the traumatic event, the community decided to effectively expel political parties and the local police. The state of Michoacán officially recognised their decision to adopt self-government in 2018. Arantepacua still demands that those responsible for the April 5th operation are brought to justice. In 2020 I was commissioned by the 14th FEMSA Biennial to create work in Michoacán. Co-authored with Arantepacua’s Communal Indigenous Council, “Kurhirani no ambakiti” concentrates on April 5th as a crucial turning point for the community of Arantepacua and brings together performance, sound, and local, traditional textiles, pottery and woodwork to craft a retelling of the events from the perspective of the community in support of their ongoing fight for justice. The main component of the work was the creation of an effigy of a life-size rhinoceros that was destroyed with fireworks and burnt in the main plaza of Arantepacua. The aesthetic violence of this action seeks to destabilise the politics of memory and support the healing of collective trauma by dismantling the oppressor/oppressed, victim/victimizer dichotomies.

Solmaz Collective: Helen Eriksen, Gry O. Ulrichsen, Zahra Bayati Stones and the Destabilisation of Safe Ethical Space

The Solmaz collective propose a performance lecture based on an experience of racial violence towards one of our members. It was during a conference about the inclusion of minorities in cultural school activities. We found that when trying to analyse the episode through artistic expressions Gry and Helen continually fell into a pit of whiteness; autonomous and self-directing, the artistic expressions aimed at articulating of a racist situation indeed produced a racialised scene of violence. We have allowed the symbolic, affective and discursive power of the image to challenge our entangled positions within the colonial racially stratified systems of power. (Crenshaw, 1989) They could not see nor exit this entanglement with colonial history without the embodied presence of Zahra. Her presence in the room kindled physical sensual response to the violence of the images that they were producing (Khanna, 2020; Vásquez, 2020). It is an ongoing painful process of unlearning (Spivak) that affects all three individuals who have been subjected to the same destructive colonising images and mindsets as Gry and Helen (Gilroy, 1993; Said, 1993). All three, despite thoroughly understanding the discourses of post-colonialism and colonisation of the self could not withstand its workings in isolation; they needed these embodied visceral meetings to understand the irreducible site of colonisation, that of the body. (Khanna, 2020, Vásquez, 2020) We will discuss how ethical boundaries, albeit with noble intensions, held Gry and Helen in a pit of whiteness supports institutionalised racialising structures in art and education on all levels. (Eriksen et al., 2020) We have persisted through inner and outer conflicts, a commonality in all collective endeavors. Our diverse positions stemming from differing historical narratives are contested as they converged. Thus, the question of safe space and safe ethical space becomes central when we ask; For whom are these spaces safe?

Lexington Davis Subverting the Stitch: Textiles and Violence in Second-wave Feminist Art

Histories of craft in feminist art have complicated the distinctions between “high” and “low” art that have marginalized women’s contributions for centuries, rendering their labor inconsequential and invisible. Such historical accounts highlight the ways that feminist artists reclaimed craft to question domesticity, aesthetic value, and canon construction. However, few studies examine how women artists engaged craft, and specifically textiles, to scrutinize connections between the everyday violence inflicted on women’s bodies and the unpaid domestic work they perform. While narratives surrounding the body and violence have dominated scholarly work on second-wave performance and video art, the contributions of textile art to such debates has largely been overlooked. From the perspective of second-wave feminist artistic practice, I analyze Birgit Jürgenssen’s drawing “Women’s Refuge I” (c. 1974), Annegret Soltau’s stitched collages and performance works with thread (1970s), Francoise Janicot’s rope performance “L’Encoconnage” (1972), and Annette Messager’s series of embroideries “Ma collection de proverbes” (1974). Each work explores how textile materials are capable of wreaking violence on women’s bodies, while simultaneously possessing the potential to be weaponized against oppressive forces. Wrapping themselves in thread almost to the point of suffocation, turning attention toward the crafting needle’s ability to inflict pain, and highlighting connections between the stitching of wounds and sewing of clothing, these artists reveal how textiles are at once tools of violent oppression and potential means for feminist revolutionary action. Through analysis of the above works, I claim that engagement with textiles allowed second-wave artists to expose how the “domestic” functions as a site where historical, societal, and physical violence against women frequently converges. Ultimately, I argue that, like performance and video, textile works are integral to the larger history of feminist body art and second-wave artistic responses to gendered violence.

Nicholas F. Callaway Mars and Minerva

Today’s Ciudad Universitaria, home to three of Madrid’s universities, may not strike the casual visitor, or even the enrolled student, as a landscape of violence. However, for two-and-a-half years the front line of the Spanish Civil War snaked right through the campus, as the schools’ newly built modernist buildings were quickly turned into fortresses, and benign quads and green areas were incised with trenches. Today’s landscape is somewhat of a contradiction: on the one hand there is practically no signage indicating the traces of this violent past, while on the other these traces – bullet holes, whole facades reconstructed in poor-quality post-war brick – are hiding in plain sight all throughout. I began to make rubbings of these traces in hopes that the mere act of showing them, making them visible, would constitute a condemnation of violence. I chose rubbings in particular as a denuded form of representation that might avoid the pitfalls of overly aestheticized photographic depictions of war. However, as I researched the sites, I learned that in many cases these very marks were intentionally left visible during the Franco regime’s reconstruction project, the first phase of which was completed in 1943. In his inaugural speech that fall as part of an elaborate program of re-opening ceremonies, Franco referred to the campus as “fields of Mars and Minerva,” in line with the regime’s ideal student as warrior monk. In my talk I will analyze the different values of showing these marks of violence, as a warning to students or as a remembrance of past injustices. I will discuss the use of ruins, destruction and reconstruction in the regime’s ideology, while at the same time examining the implications of rendering visible, through artistic intervention, this and other landscapes of violence.

Amina Ejaz and Zohreen Murtaza POST 9/11: EXQUISITE VIOLENCE AND THE ABSENT BODY IN THE WORKS OF PAKISTANI ARTISTS 

Miniature Painting in South Asia traces its evolution to the royal ateliers of the Mughal courts of India from the early 16th century. By the time of Partition of Pakistan in 1947 from British Raj, this art form had been relegated to the status of a timeless but dying traditional art. In the backdrop of 9/11 and the events that followed, miniature underwent a revivalist transformation as it merged with contemporary art practices that catapulted many Pakistani artists into the global art market. These artists had responded to the bloodshed, violence and chaos that the country witnessed in the wake of America’s War on Terror. Even as they appeared to comment on their immediate present, Pakistani artists were, in reality drawing from a vast repertoire of violence, sectarian strife and instability that had besieged the country for decades. Aesthetically, they were drawing from seductive historical illustrations of violence depicted in miniature painting. Shunning bodily depictions of carnage, Pakistani artists began to employ specific visual tropes of this genre emphasizing beauty, finesse and aestheticization in their depiction of bloodshed. Bodies were absent but their presence was ritualized with the use of blood. This paper will examine the works of Rashid Rana, Imran Qureshi, Khadim Ali and Ramzan Jafri to question and interrogate this intersection of violence and aesthetics that dominates the works of these artists.

Ivan Gerát Spectacles of violence between medieval and contemporary art

Spectacles of violence between medieval and contemporary art The variability of violent images and their ideological frameworks in medieval art offers an ideal starting point for comparing similar phenomena of contemporary art. The paper will compare the spectacles of religious violence, as represented above all by images of tortured bodies, hanged on a wooden framework, with a similar structural arrangement of some performances by contemporary Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch. While the aesthetics of violence is very similar in both cases, their interpretations differ substantially. Medieval religious ideology worked with the concepts of Christoformitas or christomimesis, which could function as synonymous, but their practical applications have lead in several directions. Another polarity is apparent in contemporary reading of these images, where extensive polemics exist about the hidden eroticism of these images. The Orgies and Mysteries Theatre by Hermann Nitsch works with a much broader cycle of mythological narratives to explain a similar iconography. A confrontation of those two image groups opens an unexpected question of common denominator, including the most famous tragical myths that continue to influence European culture and the complex responses of these violent spectacles´ beholders. The aesthetics of these spectacles works on several levels interacting with sublime philosophical ideas and obscure subconscious motivations. A presentation of moving visual representations of violence and the discourse analysis concerning their interpretations will contribute to a better understanding of conceptual systems, which continue to define the critical coordinates of violent images in ideological systems of representation.

Touloumidi’s talk will give an insight into her ongoing PhD project ‘Pharmakos’, both in terms of the research process as well as the research findings. The overall inquiry investigates jewellery and body adornments at times of social conflict. The symbolic and physical agenda of the wearable craft object is examined both historically and in contemporary times. The key focus is to explore the materialisation of social friction on these mediums and their operation in the public realm with the aim to propose wearable objects in engaging with current socio-political issues of today. Aspects of suppression as well as resistance are diagnosed through the lenses of body-related craft and the effect on social identity. Through identifying focal points of the medium’s agency of dispute and marginalization and by appropriating and subverting this vocabulary and initial social function, the project aims at proposing agents of dissent, to evoke discourse and position a body in the public realm. The presentation will share research conducted at historical archives, where cases of social injustice and oppression had been documented. Among others, through fieldtrips to Bundesarchiv Berlin and also to KZ-Gedenstätte Dachau, input data was collected for creating “vom Abzeichen zum Auszeichnen”(de). The investigation looked into the design evolution of wearable signs, worn as indicators to systematize and marginalize human bodies during the WWII. A selection of key documents will be shared, which were digitalized for the first time and supported the evolution of the new body of work. The talk will delve into the research experience and the material, formal and overall aesthetic decisions of the outcomes. Due to copyright material restrictions from the visited archives, the presentation may only be presented physically at Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts or towards a closed online audience, where recording would be not allowed.

Jamie Holman & Masimba Hwati Rough Music

Artist Jamie Holman’s father, a solider; was shot in Belfast in 1972. Artist Masimba Hwati’s father was a police officer during Colonial rule in Zimbabwe. . This performance and discussion will explore the parallel relationships of two cross-continent artists with their own fathers; this work will interrogate the use of signifying objects – objects of conflict, objects of culture, objects of symbolism – to create music, noise and performance. Presented as a split space or split screen work, the left side is a performance of ‘bin lids’ striking the ground, and the right screen a performance of spears on shields, which, when projected side by side – speak to each other of violence, trauma and the small memories trivia captured in banal objects, rituals and resistances that create ‘Rough Music. ‘ This performance is a display of colonial / neo-colonial power structures, and the rebellious acts of working class people who challenged them, ‘Rough music’ becoming the sound of resistance, and a memorial to violence. The sound of bin lids being banged became a familiar reverberation on the streets of Northern Ireland. A clatter created by women who would warn of soldiers approaching their homes. The bin lid is a seemingly mundane object that resonates for all of those involved in the conflict, from the women who used them as a warning alarm, to the soldiers who would hear them as they approached; to the I.R.A. volunteers who would respond to the sound of approaching soldiers. It is in the banal images and artefacts that the memories of conflict and trauma reside. The split screen device facilitates a juxtaposition of sounds from these two histories, both impacted by British colonialism. What is exotic in one location, is banal in another. The rhythms created will be cut between spaces, crossing both conceptual and physical spaces, proposing shared narratives and proposing sound as a residue of violence.

Michelle Eistrup & Anders JuhlAmnesia (2016,2019) & A letter to Denmark 5,26 mins, Breathing Archives (2021) 14,04 mins

Amnesia (2016,2019) _ A letter to Denmark 5,26 mins Amnesia is a sound piece in which a seemingly androgynous young voice speaks in a duet with itself about living in the present-day existence in denial of its (colonial) past. The tone is slow and whispery, as is the music which frames the poem. Breathing Archives(2021) 14,04 mins Collaborations with liberated former colonies (“Befreite Völker”), as well as a transparent policy on restitution to those states,marked the museum strategy in the GDR. After the German reunification, such efforts became temporarily discontinued. However, the former policies’ results are now becoming a valuable and appreciated approach in today’s decolonial context. Breathing Archives explores human remains and their histories in the ethnographic Collection in Leipzig. Ordered by the museum – as museums and collections all over Europe -, the hunt for these remains led to both grave robbery and regular massacres in Australia and many other places.The sound collage contains the voice of Dr. Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider. She is responsible for repatriating human remains from the Grassi Museum in Leipzig and a commentary by a seemingly older woman of unknown European origin.

Ujjwal Utkarsh Special Service

On January 17th 2016, Rohith Vemula committed suicide. He left behind a note saying that he was doing so because of the oppression he had been facing at the hands of his university administration, because he belonged to a particular caste, and his active role in Dalit politics on campus. With his demise, a wave of protests swept across the country. The State tried to, and succeeded in, suppressing many of them. Amongst these was a candlelight vigil organised at India Gate in Rohith’s memory, led by his mother Radhika Vemula and attended by students from all over the country, including a contingent from his university, the University of Hyderabad. Surprisingly, the State did not allow this peaceful vigil either. All the attendees, including Radhika, were detained by the police and taken to nearby police stations in DTC buses- normally the public transport vehicles of the city- which were marked ’00 Special Service’. Present at this vigil, just to participate, I started recording some sounds. This piece is a reflection on the series of events that took place that evening, symbolically trying to light the candle that wasn’t lit on that day. I want to present this with the intent of exploring as to how violence can be portrayed through cinema or arts. A lot of protest/political films end up showing violence (especially state violence) as part of portraying the ‘truth of the situation’. Herein I want to question the basic idea and intent of such representation itself. By showing more violence, do we end up either making that violent act more and more digestible? What could it mean then also to just be with a protest, especially one that was quite brutally suppressed. Can cinema be also used as a tool to spiritually be with the protest?

Andrea Liu Home as a Site of Humiliation

Home is often idealized (particularly during COVID lockdown era) as a “white fluffy teddy bear” site of harmony, safety, comfort, belonging, care, affirmation, and togetherness. However, for LGBT children who are despised, dis-owned or ostracized by heterosexual parents, home can be a site of humiliation; home as a site of a micropolitics of conflicting power differentials, internecine warfare & power struggles; home as a site of a low-grade but persistent form of aggression and repetitive acts of intimate humiliation; home as a place where you have to escape to have any hope of self-preservation; home as a wounding reminder of one’s failures, defeats, and loss of self; home as a site of socially acceptable and invisibilized violence. This is a performative lecture which takes as its starting-off point the trope of “home as a site of humiliation and psychological violence” as it manifests itself in a multitude of cinematic representations, such as such as The Breakfast Club (1984, director: John Hughes), Harold and Maude (1971), My Own Private Idaho (1991, director: Gus Van Sant), Happiness (1996, director: Todd Haynes), The Myth of the Fingerprints (1997), American Beauty (1999), The Sweet Hereafter (1997. director: Atom Egoyan), Safe (1995, director: Todd Haynes), Funny Games (1997, director: Michael Haneke), Mother (2017, director: Darren Aronofsky), Lady Jane (1986), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Splendour in the Grass (1961), Jane Eyre (novel, 1847, author: Charlotte Bronte). It takes as its starting point an excerpt from “Manifesto Against the Home:” “For so long Jeanie had indelibly ingrained in her psyche that home was a site of confrontations that produced an intimate humiliation that no place outside of the home had a similar power to inflict, that all new homes she went to she already had embedded in her a blueprint of how to act. For so long she viewed home as a place to protect herself from, a place to keep her guard up, a place where her greatest hope (or relief) would be to simply pass through as a ghost (or stranger) unnoticed—that she couldn’t comprehend the notion of “making someplace your home”. She felt sheer revulsion at the thought of decorating her home to reflect her personality, of accumulating things that were special to her to fill her home, or of any type of “nesting” impulse that would turn her home into a comforting, reassuring place. To her home was a place that she had trained all her life to erect a hardened shell of psychic armor in order to survive.”

When Denilson Baniwa, a Brazilian artist of indigenous origin, declares, in 2021, to be an “anthropophagous” artist and associates that to the need of decolonizing Western art, an idea also reiterated in a poem in which he accuses, with a good dose of irony, the “falsehood” of Brazilian modernist anthropophagy, we realize that anthropophagy and its defensive active gestures against hegemonic culture – consequently, against its processes of violence, silencing, acculturation and exclusion – remain in dispute. Baniwa’s poem ends talking about a “long digestion” when refering to colonial times (see: https://brooklynrail.org/2021/2/criticspage). But where Baniwa speaks of a “long digestion”, we could try replacing it for a long indigestion. Taking as a starting point the cultural theory of anthropophagy developed in Brazilian context, and the idea of ​​indigestion, this seminar aims to retrace the cultural theory of anthropophagy to focus on its historical and present tensions. As a cultural movement, anthropophagy consists of violently devouring the other as a defensive strategy against domination. It consists in critical assimilation of heterogeneous and conflicting elements, and therefore it is not a matter of simple adhesion to hegemonic discourse as it implies choice, editing, transformation. Any principle of harmony is rejected: the formal elements and social emblems remain in violent conflict, antagonistic; the shock operations are not sublimated. Therefore, indigestion will focus on opening up some artistic works and critical practices that face and produce “choked” situations: stuck in the throat, difficult to breath, to swallow or to digest completely; situations that produce dissent, conflict. Indigestion takes consensus as false covering in its appearance of docile and homogeneous sociability (as the forces of globalization and miscegenation seek to produce) the violence of everyday life in its most diverse spheres, in the current state of emergency at global level.

Lisa Deml The End of the Sky: Un/Framing the Syrian Conflict

From the relentless documentation of the Syrian conflict derived a format of communication in which visibility and violence are dramatically intertwined. Characteristically blurry and narrowly focused photos and videos were credited by global media networks with immediacy and authenticity, and yielded a concept of ‘citizen journalism’ that no longer defined a mode of image production but served an aesthetic of ‘cruel images’. This emerging visual hegemony propelled processes of anonymisation and victimisation. A decade into the conflict, we face a disjunction between a seeming overrepresentation of the Syrian subject and an inability to see that subject. Increasingly, citizen journalists turn to formal practices within visual culture to articulate their claims through documentary means. Instead of displaying violence and suffering, the film installation – door open – (2019) by the collective ZouZou Group, e.g., exposes the dreadful conditions of its creation by manifesting the effects of warfare on the formal language of its production. Like a seismograph, this work registers a state of historical, social, political, cultural, and individual crisis through the form it takes (or does not take). The operations of the image frame are thus brought to the fore which, in Butler’s words, ‘conduct the dehumanizing norm, restrict what is perceivable and what can be.’ As a technique for producing (in)visibility and (in)dignity, the frame delineates the premises for gaining a sensate understanding of—and opposition to—war. Ten years into the Syrian conflict, at a critical point to end armed struggle and yet not to surrender the battle over narrative, I want to examine the effects of (an)aestheticizing violence in an effort to identify processes of victimisation and strategies for dignified (self-)representation. Ultimately, to transcend Sontag’s allegation that too many images of suffering anaesthetise viewership, this paper configures spectatorship as a practice of critical sensitivity toward the image frame.

Fiona Amundsen The Half-life of Violence: Developing Filmic Methods for Socio-Ethical Listening and Seeing WWII Nuclear Imperialisms 

Questions of visibility and witnessing are particularly pertinent to socio-ethically remembering the violence associated with WWII imperial nuclear warfare. Nuclear violence and its aftermath are simultaneously spectacularly visible while also dangerously imperceptible. The pyrocumulus mushroom-shaped cloud has become the quintessential aestheticized visual icon associated with atomic bombs. There is a disparity between the absolute visuality of this icon of violence and the long-lasting lived realities of the odourless and invisible of nuclear radiation. Drawing on and extending Aotearoa New Zealand Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s idea of the listening camera, this presentation explores how filmic methods are able to work between this space of visibility and invisibility. Referencing my recent film Half-life, I argue that methods encompassing non-imaged audio, docu-fictional storytelling and archival footage can enable intersubjective acts of socio-ethical listening, witnessing and remembering the WWII atomic bombings of Japan. Half-life utilises the Japanese practice of rakugo, which is a mode of storytelling that involves performing a narrative through limited props and gestures. Due to the spartan aesthetic form of rakugo, the role of listening and imagination are highlighted over literal seeing. The performer’s narration conjures an entirely invisible world, which in the context of nuclear radiation is a powerful tool. Half-life uses archival footage of ‘flash-burns’; the permanent shadows that were created by objects and bodies who were exposed to the bomb’s intense flash and high temperatures. This imagery, once edited with the rakugo performance, is suggestive of the invisible radiation that poisoned the people, animals, lands and infrastructure of both cities. The film’s methods work to establish a discursive yet transformative space where both the visible and invisible violence associated with the atomic bombings are made present; hearing the visible and seeing the invisible establishes an ethics of social response-ability to the ongoing legacies of WWII nuclear imperialism.

Elisabeth Hjorth Mutating Metaphors – Autistic writing in a neuromixed space

In his “Critique of Violence” Walter Benjamin states: “Nonviolent agreement is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows the use of unalloyed means of agreement.” The relationship between the Writer(s) and the Reader(s) might be understood as a mutual understanding in which conflicts do not degenerate into violence. But what about the agreement if the “civilized outlook” does not include the neurodivergent voices? If civilized texts and classrooms demand the neurotypical language, body and brain function?

Slavoj Žižek delivers a diametrically opposed view to that of language as an agreement and mutual understanding when he translates the quote by Elfriede Jelinek; “Language should be tortured to tell the truth”, into the notion of language as the great divider, “a house of torture^”. But what if language could encompass non-violent neuromixed poetics and educational spaces could provide a home for neurodivergent bodies?

According to Melanie Yergeau “autism is often figured as absent presence, an embodied state impervious to knowing”. Literary images produces silence, or essentialized stories of autistic people lacking the capacity to narrate, or reduces symbolic acts to non-symbolic motions. Such language should indeed be described as a house of torture, rather than telling the truth. In order to enable other, less dominating neurotype ways of reading and writing, can the image of the mother tongue be of use?

We started this writing process from the perspective of a neuromixed research relationship, in the context of a research project exploring autistic creative writing and possibilities of developing a neurodiverse creative writing educational space. We are experimenting with the neuromixed room; a room on neurodivergent rather than neurotypical conditions.

Many autistic persons have described the written language as more primary than spoken language. Such an approach to language can be connected to new understandings of literary composition and how practices of writing can be informed by neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is a viewpoint that brain differences are normal, rather than deficits. Currently it is emerging as a theoretical and methodological perspective within research. In this project, we want to explore neurodiversity as a resource in artistic research and education.

We create a “neuromixed” space for explorations of autistic experiences and literary composition, and put these into dialogue both with different institutions and with political/ethical discussions. The neurological differences within the group are seen as both fruitful and challenging, demanding new ways of co-working, communication and thinking about the relationships between different “neurotypes”.

Monique Yim The Aesthetics of Violence and Disturbance: Social Political, LGBTQ+ and Human Rights Themed Performance and Visual Art

I will present my selected performance and visual art projects themed in social political, LGBTQ+ and human rights issues to demonstrate the aesthetics of violence and disturbance. “F•E•A•R” (Hong Kong, 2020) and “Under the Sun, Under the Moon” (Hong Kong, 2019-2020) : Both works address the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. The aesthetics of physical violence and disturbance – body in pain, wounds, collective memories… situated in public / protest on-site / audience witnesses. “Hong Kong Style Break Up” (Hong Kong/Canada, 2020-2021) : We may start relationships through the use of social media, but also end it the same way virtually. As social media and online dating apps blossom, they open up opportunities for LGBTQ+ to connect and form intimate relationships. However it also increases their chances of encountering non-physical violence. Those individuals with intersectional identities continue to remain vulnerable, being ignored and oppressed from their various communities in real life. How do they endure and recover from violence in their intimate relationships? What are the emotional consequences on them after break up? I interviewed Chinese background LGBTQ+ people of colour from Hong Kong and Canada for their stories, invited them to express and represent their emotions, and transformed them into still images. I also hope people can process feelings and heal through art in a safe platform. “Queer Series No.10: Ungrounded Tango” (Germany, 2017) : I and my same-sex partner took turns to carry each other until both of us became too tired to walk forward from a church in Berlin. During the process, we looked romantic, yet represented the hardship (included discrimination and inequality) of LGBTQ+ couples in their relationships around the world with our bodies, and the slowness in achieving progress towards equality. One month after, same-sex marriage was eventually made legal in Germany.

Alberto Cattani Rules of Disorder: Violence as an expressive tool in the hooligans’ community

Football is a ritual where violence is legitimated as nowhere else in society, and Hooliganism is the highest expression of translation of a mere football confrontation in a real fight intrinsic of symbolic values. This lecture focuses on the transnational hardcore football supporter movement to examine its behavior as an agglomeration of identities in forming a specific unity that uses violence as a tool of identification. Violence is a critical scenario to frame the intricate pattern of friendships and rivalries, the basis of the identity of a community. Respect from peers and a sense of belonging are considered as core drivers of collective violence. Hooliganism consists of dramas of ritualized ‘aggro’ performed mainly through men within ‘rules of disorder’. Their particular interest in violence is expressed in the theatrical and carnivalesque performance, the pursuit of the ‘real man’ – in order to gain respect – the social formation of manhood, and eventually, the sense of belonging to the local territory. In particular, my research examines the ‘situations,’ the rules, and all those behaviors that lead to the formation of such a complex community. For a deep comprehension of the phenomenon, we can think about hooligans in terms of an ‘Imagined Community’ in Benedict Anderson’s sense. We can consider football hardcore fan groups “as a deep, horizontal comradeship” where violence is a shared cultural practice to challenge their rivals successfully. This lecture aims to give a more profound insight into hardcore football communities’ phenomenon, paying attention to the symbolic value of violence. The stadium is a ‘symbolic frame,’ a space that separates the fans from the ‘outside world.’ My lecture attempts to answer the following question: how is a Hooligan Community ‘imagined’ — in Anderson’s sense — and violently expressed?

Áine McKenny The Art of the Troubles in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has a conflicted past and a contested present. The thirty years of armed conflict, known as the Troubles, has only recently been concluded and its legacy is still palpable today. The conflict is unresolved, contested, violent and emotional. This paper seeks to analyse an exhibition entitled Troubles Art, which featured artists’ responses to the conflict. The exhibition had five themes: Conflict, Circumstance, Captured, Community and Continuance. The works explored both the impact of violence directly and the longer-term or indirect legacies of violence. Looking at specific artworks as well as the exhibition as a whole, this paper will consider the aesthetics of art responding to violence and conflict. It will consider the process of displaying the violent past within the ‘post-conflict era’ and how to engage visitors with a terrain of public memory that is still unresolved and contested through art. The events of the conflict are complex. There is no consensus on how to remember them, and they often complicate binaries drawn between victim and perpetrator. Interpreting and displaying the conflict in exhibitions is difficult. Yet, my research considers the potential of art exhibitions to show a nuanced and complex narrative of the Troubles. These issues can be seen in the art included in the Troubles Art exhibition. There is beauty, emotion, trauma, power and profoundness to viewing violence through art.

In May 1968 Peter Brötzmann Octet recorded the seminal European improvisation album Machine Gun, released at Brötzmann’s label BRÖ. Machine Gun is a brut violent piece of music; what was it about? In Brötzmann’s words: “There is no contradiction between creation and destruction. I never thought music was a healing force of the universe.[…]. But we wanted to change things; we needed a new start. In Germany, we all grew up with the same thing: ‘Never again.’ But in the government, all the same old Nazis were still there. We were angry. We wanted to do something”.

Seeing in the rear-view mirror, with Machine Gun, European free jazz and free improvisation manifested itself as a distinguished voice in jazz. Evidently, it displays clear roots in African American free jazz, which emerged in the US in the early 60:s, in parallel to the rice of the civil rights movement, however with no formal connections. Free jazz was first and foremost driven by musical experimentalism, whereas its political manifestations is rather in the way the music is organized, then what it directly expresses. As Brit author Christopher Cox claims: “Free Improvisation is almost by definition outsider music, opposed to capitalist business-as-usual”, which is affirmed by Brit improvisor Eddie Prévost: “it is a form of music which […] counters the ethos which characterizes capitalism”. Machine Gun challenged Brötzmann to find a way to organize the music, that is: to allow participating musicians the most freedom possible, but to give some structure to hold onto.

With Machine Gun as springboard the panel will discuss questions about jazz, free jazz, and free improvisation as a political force. What makes music political? Is free jazz and free improvisation still political today, or is it just a part of the European post WW2 musical canon?