Conference
Wed 4–Thu 5 Nov 2015

Time

Plenary Contributors

  • Simon Critchley
  • Coco Fusco
  • Bruno Latour
  • Jalal Toufic

The first biennial PARSE conference at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden November 4-6, 2015 takes as its point of departure the question of TIME.

Schedule

Day 1 - Wednesday4 Nov 2015

16.15-18.00

Screening of film Medium Earth by The Otolith Group (2013, 41 mins) plus discussion with Anjalika Sagar led by Andrea Phillips

Anjalika SagarJoel Sines

Medium Earth

by The Otolith Group

Part prequel and part premonition, Medium Earth is a work caught within its own imminent future and represents the outgrowth of research undertaken throughout California over 2012/13. It listens to its deserts, translates the writing of its stones, and deciphers the calligraphies of its expansion cracks. The accumulation of moving images and sounds that make up Medium Earth comprise an audiovisual essay on the millennial time of geology and the infrastructural unconscious of Southern California. Focused on the ways in which tectonic forces express themselves in boulder outcrops and the hairline fractures of cast concrete, Medium Earth participates in the cultures of prophecy and forecasting that mediate the experience of seismic upheaval. The desire to evoke the hidden substrata of the planet gives way to a morphological interpretation of the face of the earth. As an experiment in channeling the system of fault lines buried below California, Medium Earth animates the stresses and strains of physical geographies undergoing continental pressures.

The screening of Medium Earth (2013) (41mins, HD Video, Colour Sound) will be followed by; Lecture performance: The Earthquake Sensitive as Planetary Subject with image backdrop of slides from Who Does The Earth Think It Is (2014) Speakers Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines

18.00

Conversation on time

Simon CritchleyBruno Latour

Moderator: Mick Wilson

Bruno Latour and Simon Critchley will discuss shifting concepts of time and their impact on developments in art, philosophy and the social sciences in a conversation moderated by Mick Wilson. In preparation for this event, PARSE put the following questions to them:

  • What is time?
  • 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. What is your perspective on this relative interest?
  • What is your understanding of the ways in which cultural practice relates to questions of time?
  • What are chronopolitics for you?
  • Many of the proposals we received for this conference seek to engage with the crisis of “anthropocenic” You have both engaged in different ways with this issue – could you elaborate?
  • We are currently embedded in a temporality that is shaped in large part by the instantaneity of global capital. How do you see the affects of this? How can this be understood historically and philosophically?
  • Is time gendered? What might it mean to think time in relation to the question of gender?
  • Much recent theoretical discourse has focused on the ‘end of time’. What is your view of this?

Day 2 - Thursday5 Nov 2015

Passage: The Temporality of an Artifact, 8 Avatars of Time and How Soon is now CHAIR: Anders Hultqvist

Marian MackenMarc BoumeesterFrances Williams

Passage: The Temporality of an Artifact

by Marian Macken

Writing on the temporality of architecture predominantly refers to the life of the building—its construction, inhabitation, and ruin—and the lives lived within the building. But this accounts for only some aspects of architecture’s temporality. There is a multiplicity, a plurality, of “times” that may be acknowledged within architecture, that are separate and different from the built work. These relate to the representation of architecture and the design process, the exhibition and archiving of architecture, and its dissemination. This paper seeks to address these aspects of temporality and hence, to broaden the temporal territory of architecture and of associated spatial practices.

The multiplicity of times will be examined through the case study of selected drawings that document John Hejduk’s Wall House 2 (Bye House). This project, originally designed in the 1970s for a site in Connecticut, USA, was built in the Netherlands 28 years later, and one year after the death of the architect. The project reflects Hejduk’s theoretical position regarding temporality, but more than this, the aberrant design and construction processes allow for an extension of this thinking.

Through examining particular drawings, or artifacts, within different contexts—as a made object, as part of a series of iterations of one scheme, and within the architect’s oeuvre, then as an archived, exhibited, published image—Edmund Husserl’s notion of a “thickened” present is examined: rather than looking for evidence of temporality within the frame of one drawing or building, the drawing as an artifact demonstrates the passage of time through different temporal contexts. The relationship between built space, documentation and ramifications for the wider field of spatial practice will also be discussed.

 

8 Avatars of Time

by Marc Boumeester

Theorist Sanford Kwinter draws on Waddington’s concept of the epigenetics landscape when he states that the concept of the Chreod must be regarded as “the most important concept of the 20th century.” [i]. The epigenetic landscape deals with the progression of non-linear systems of time that can be seen ’as an invisible but not imaginary future in an invisible but not imaginary landscape’. [ii] The very moment the virtual becomes the actual can be called an event, which according to Massumi ’is a time that does not pass, that only comes to pass’[iii].

Time is divided into static time and dynamic time, the first to be called aion, the second to be called chronosAionis the incorporeal, omnipresent host of events. Chronos however, is time in being. If we regard chronos as being quasi-objective – the mere passing of equal parts of time – then kairos would express how this time is being. Therefore I claim that any shape of kairos stands to chronos, as an Euclidean space stands to a Topological space.

Previous work with students (in cinema and architecture) made clear there were no instruments precise enough to describe different states of time. This led to the development of a taxonomy of the appearances of time, which are reflections of the progression of time from the moment it transformed from aion into chronos.

This paper will present this taxonomy, called ‘8 avatars of time’ which knows the following categories: Volume, Significance, Necessity, Sequence, Bearing, Indexical, Simultaneity and Proximity. It will also elaborate on how this nomenclature is helpful to bridge these philosophical concepts of time with the practice of manipulating time.

[i] Kwinter, Sanford (2001), Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, Cambridge: MIT Press, p 9.

[ii] Ibid, p 10.

[iii] Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press

 

How Soon is Now

by Frances Williams

The Smiths ‘how soon is now’ (1985) is often heard reprised in club mixes, as background music and in advertising. It seems timeless, recognized out of time but also in the present and far removed and abstracted from its plaintive origin. Like Jackie annuals, instagram and school disco, fragments of a past repeated make their appearances in the present as affective.

Agamben refers to the contemporary as one who firmly holds their gaze in their own time, not to perceive the light, but so as to perceive its darkness. Derrida’s concept of hauntology refers to and the past being present but not dead or alive. Deleuzian concept of time is as non-chronological and manifold, where the modalities of time are the synthesis of habit, memory and the new. These ideas are suggestive of gestures of looking away to the past, present and future.

How may this appear in contemporary visual arts practice without nostalgia or irony? In what ways could a performance related arts practice embody these gestures and draw on these philosophical ideas of time?

This performance presentation performs gestures of looking away to the past, present and future using the vehicle of Fran’s People -Freeform Interpretation to draw on ideas of time; being out of time, uni-directionality, paradox and disjointedness.

Unequal distribution of time in transdisciplinary research, On the agency of bodies fallen out of time, The Politics of This Time CHAIR: Erling Björgvinsson

Helena KraffEva Maria JernsandSandra NoethTrine Friis Sørensen

Unequal distribution of time in transdisciplinary research

by Helena Kraff and Eva Maria Jernsand

Transdisciplinary research is described as a participatory and interactive way of producing knowledge, where issues of societal nature are approached from multiple angles through the collaboration between different academic disciplines, industry and society. The principle is that research should not merely inform society; rather members of the society are seen as knowledgeable participants in the research process (e.g. Gibbons 1994; Nowotny 2004; Robinson 2008; Pohl et al. 2010). However, although with good intentions, the essence of transdisciplinarity risks to be undermined if the aspect of time is not acknowledged as an issue of power. For example, problems are often ‘identified’ and project frameworks decided upon long before local stakeholders are involved. Moreover, participants from academia get remunerated for their time whilst for example citizens may not. Time can thereby turn projects that are meant to deal with social inclusion, to reinforcing social exclusion.
This paper critically reflects on a transdisciplinary project in Kisumu, Kenya, where the authors are actively involved. The project is set up between researchers from Kenya and Sweden, coming from different disciplines and universities, and involves local organisations and residents from a small fishing village just outside Kisumu city. The reflection is built around a number of questions that explore challenges that have arisen during the process, many of which are related to unequal distribution of time. Who has time, or is given time? How does time affect stakeholder relationships? And how is time related to aspects such as gender? Stakeholders are often grouped into broad categories, which ignore their diversities and different prerequisites. This makes the distribution of time unequal in projects and calls for changes in attitudes and structures.

The agency of bodies fallen out of time

by Sandra Noeth

When looking at and experiencing situations of conflict and crisis – environmental calamities, post-war situations, so-called ‘low intensity’ conflicts or everyday scenes of indifference, carelessness and negligence – we can observe a specific kind of systemic, structural violence: a violence which is not directly perceivable and observable, which is often not immediate, difficult to repeat and imitate, to foresee and to time, a violence which challenges our representations, our words and movements. A violence which witnesses to the time and the movement of that which seems to be motionless (see: G. Deleuze, Pourparlers). This kind of violence is gradual, plane, creeping, silent and unfolding in the very entanglement of different spaces, dimensions and times.
The paper takes interest in this very temporality and its conditions and asks in which way it affects and effects the body: what are the bodies emerging in and through this timely constellation? What kind of temporal and spatial strategies do they allow, call for and aesthetisize? How can we grasp the emerging, the moment of touch where concepts and experiences of presence, past and future fall into one another?
In dialogue with selected artistic works and case studies of bodies in conflict, I would like to argue that the timely dimension of systemic violence describes, produces and helps emerge expanded, projected, suspended, absent, suspicious, hesitating, lazy bodies, bodies in repetition, suspended between action and reaction, response and responsibility. In the following, I propose to read those bodies that seem to have fallen out of time as an invitation to critically re-think our individual and collective capacity for action.

Politics of This Time

by Trine Friis Sørensen

This Time It’s Political was the title of a solo exhibition by Swedish artist Kajsa Dahlberg at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Denmark in 2013. By calling attention to this time, the exhibition implies that something has preceded it; there has been a before, and in effect a temporality is instated. There is, it would seem, a certain repetition at work, but this repetition is not identical with its former occurrence—it is only this timethat it is political. In my paper, I conduct readings of two of the exhibition’s artworks, “Fifty Minutes in Half an Hour” and “A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries,” and while the subject matter of both these artworks are of a political nature, I will argue how they become political this time through their gestures of iteration.

Not Now! Now! CHAIR: Mick Wilson

Renate LorenzYasmine Eid-SabbaghAna HoffnerMara Lee Gerden

Not Now! Now!

by Renate Lorenz, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, Ana Hoffner, Mara Lee Gerden

We will present some of the ongoing artistic, performative and academic projects that are related to four years of artistic research around chronopolitics at the Phd in Practice Program / Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, especially the conference (2014) and book (Sternberg 2015) Not Now! Now! – chronopolitics, art and research. The research engages with the methodologies of artistic practices to intervene into the dominant politics of time: questions include the queerness of memory, the challenge of visualizing time and its embodiments and the temporalities of encounters in a (post-)colonial environment. The debates thus take up an important recent debate around chronopolitics, especially from postcolonial and queer theory, and connect it with art practices that rather stutter time, introduce breaks, citations, anachronisms, temporal drag, deferrals and collapses between time and meaning.

The panel will produce a dialogue between a film screening (Ana Hoffner), a performance (Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh) and short inputs which introduce new terms into a discussion of the politics of time.

Renate Lorenz will introduce the time of the Not Now! Now! and a specific type of research that remains opaque and deferred. Mara Lee Gerden elaborates on the question how we could conceive of a more complex concept of the “stranger” on the basis of a queer temporalization, taking into account two commonly accepted narratives in our time: the Narrative of Progress (Halberstam, Ahmed etc) and the Rescue Narrative (Spivak, David Eng). Ana Hoffner presents her film “Transferred memories, embodied documents” (2014) which creates a (queer) relation between two performers who deal with images of atrocities together. Connected to the film Ana Hoffner will give an input on her concept of “queer memory.” Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh’s performance refers to her research in the refugee camp Burj al-Shamali in Lebanon and the challenges of an uneven relation in research.

23.30

Flat Time House screenings (various, c. 40 mins) plus discussion with Claire Staunton led by Andrea Phillips

Claire Louise StauntonJohn Hill

Flat Time House – Screening (John Latham and various)

Flat Time House Institute (FTHo) was initiated in 2008 in the house that John Latham (1921-2006) occupied until his death, the site of his decade long experiment with the idea of Flat Time. FTHo, led by curator, Claire Louise Staunton, commissions on-going artistic projects that come out of the Artists Placement Group tradition (itself an interesting experiment in the temporality of the commission and the artist as an ‘incidental person’), hosts an archive, artists’ residencies and an alternative education programme run by artist and educator John Hill.

For PARSE, FTHo presents a screening programme pairing moving image works from contemporary artists with films by John Latham, using his Time-Base Theory as a curatorial device. The selected works perform the various bands of Latham’s time-based spectrum – from Least Event (quantum) to the frequency of human perception, to human reproduction, to cosmos.
The screening of contemporary short film and video works, as well as a short presentation is an attempt to re-read Latham’s cosmology through the lens of contemporary art and theory to provide a renewed relevance.

For Latham, science and language worked on the assumption that space and object are primary and fundamental building blocks of the universe. Latham’s Time-Base Theory, on the other hand, assumes that time and event are primary, with objects existing as traces of events. Phenomena, matter and things from the smallest to the most epic are derivative of repeated events (or loops) of varying intensity. Latham’s Event Structure, is a spatial configuration of the Time-Base Theory as a spectrum along a horizontal axis represents the smallest possible Least Event represented as Band 1 (or A) of which its duration and impact is quantum, and the universe as event at Band 36 (or U). Between these two extremes, the spectrum allows for all cosmological, geological or spiritual phenomena, all physical, emotional or psychological states within the same system.

Art as Method/Archaeology from Afar CHAIR: Henk Slager

Annie DanisAnnie MalcolmElise Nuding

Art as Method/Archaeology from Afar:

by Annie Danis, Annie Malcolm and Elise Nuding

Temporal and Spatial Interventions in Ethnography

Performance and Anthropology are temporal entities. Duration, location, and documentation are key methodological concepts. This “panel” brings together several methods of presentation to explore the relationship of creative practice to the analysis of creative practice through time. Combining lecture, discussion, and performance, the panel participants reflect on the relationship of temporal methods to their research on art production, art markets, and art as method in the social sciences. To do so, we present several works that illustrate these experimentations with academic fields to probe the boundaries between Anthropology, Archaeology, and Art.

In the Fall of 2014 all Malcolm and Danis collaborated with three other anthropologists and artists on an exhibition, performance, and installation of work, hyperloop (or) round holes, exploring the temporal unboundedness of performance. In the Spring of 2015 we collaborated again on a sound composition and performance, Not Seen / Seen, exploring memory and experience in archaeological knowledge production, which was presented in the context of an academic conference in order to disrupt the concept of expertise.

These works serve as the jumping off point for an exploration through sound, movement and anthropological analysis developed over the summer of 2015 from Malcolm’s recent anthropological field-work in China. Our specific intention is to queer the boundary between art and analysis and open a discussion about representation of and in time.

NEW TIME, The Dystopia of the Now, Infrastructuring interventions or intervening infrastructures? CHAIR: Henric Benesch

Kate HillMarnie BadhamLesley GrayKatrien DreessenLiesbeth HuybrechtsSelina SchepersPablo Calderón Salazar

NEW TIME:

by Kate Hill and Marnie Badham

Rethinking the ‘social turn’ in artist residencies

What is the effect on artists’ working methodologies when time is limited? How does a short-term residency affect artists’ relationships with people and place? Providing time and space away from everyday life, traditional residency models offer structure for individual creative production. Some traditional residencies have come under recent criticism for their lack of flexibility (Zeplin, 2009), the circulation of elitism (Bialski, 2010), and lack of engagement with local communities. This lack of engagement can be attributed to the limited time that an artist has in residency but also sheds light on a new category of the itinerant artist. Kenins argues that “sometimes, in far-flung areas, there is an awkwardly colonial relationship by which residencies court foreign artists under the guise of enlightening the locals” (2013), while Pryor compares the short term approach of resident artists to “fly-in-fly-out-workers” in the Australian mining industry who often reciprocate very little relevance or value (2012).

Taking time as its starting point of critique, NEW TIME examines artistic and institutional motivations for the ‘social turn’ in artist residencies.First exploring the historical roots of residencies through retreats and colonies, we consider aspirational economies of isolation or collaboration in creative practice. Next, a broad typology of institutional programmes examines policy aims located as artist in community projects and cultural diplomacy programmes focused on intercultural exchange or market development. These motivations also interface with cultural heritage and educational programmes. This critique makes way for the consideration for alternative artist-run initiatives. The temporal concerns of series of socially-engaged residency-as-artist-projects are examined including thematic and travelling residencies. The paper concludes by offering a new time-space relationship – a new category of ‘life as practice,’ which demands lifestyle transformation towards the transnational itinerant artist or a practice with local focus on work-life balance.

 

The Dystopia of the Now

by Lesley Gray

– Contemporary Art in Qatar

In the rapidly developing cities in the Arabian Gulf, time is in flux. The breakneck speed in which the cities are being constructed, the rapid development of new cultural institutions in a region that until very recently has no art scene to speak of, and the almost complete destruction of the pre-oil landscape had created an environment where time carries great symbolic value: old vs. new, tradition vs. modernity, good vs. bad. However, as modernity and contemporaneity have not followed a linear path in the region, with the Bedouin lifestyle within living memory, there exists an environment where disparate temporalities are experienced simultaneously by everyone all the time, creating a problematic present. Within this context, the supermodernity of the Arabian Gulf has provided the canvas for the materialization of the dystopic fears of Western science fiction: a landscape of machines and metal where human beings are increasingly detached from the natural environment, increasingly isolated and autonomous. The present becomes unlivable, fetishizing the alternatives of the idealized nostalgia of the past or the anticipation of the utopian future of the completed built environments of the cities, restoring order to the chaos of the present. Contemporary artists working within this context are just beginning to explore their own relationship to the temporality of the Now. Using science fiction literature and Gulf Futurism as theoretical lens, this paper explores the supermodernity of the Arabian Gulf through two recent exhibitions by Qatari and non-Qatari expatriate contemporary artists in Doha, Qatar: Liquid Portraits at the Katara Art Center and Here|There at the Al Riwaq Exhibition Space, both which hint at the deep insecurity of the lived experience of incongruous temporality. In an environment that resembles a construction site rising from the ruins of a cultural apocalypse, how do we make sense of the present?

 

Infrastructuring interventions or intervening infrastructures?

by Katrien Dreessen, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Selina Schepers & Pablo Calderón Salazar

The role of interventions in the infrastructuring process.

Design as ‘infrastructuring’ approaches design as a long-term process of anticipation or envisioning of potential design (Björgvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren, 2012), often via the development of tools, techniques and processes that allow actors to deal with uncertainties that they encounter in participatory ways (DiSalvo, Clement & Pipek, 2013). Although ‘long-term participation’ and ‘intervention’ may appear to be contradictory, this article describes how interventions contribute to infrastructuring processes that address public space and public issues. Interventions in public space are often driven by a wish to reclaim the common right to it and regularly use a ‘hit-and-run tactic’ (Markussen, 2013). This article discusses the role that these (short-term and often disruptive) interventions can play in long-term participation (O’Neill & Doherty, 2010) and specifically their ways of making uncertainties tangible.

We analyse an infrastructuring process defined by on-going participatory interventions in Genk (BE). We discuss three series of interventions that explicitly shaped our ways of working in the infrastructuring processes, being (1) ‘Hack-a-thing’, (2) ‘FanLab’ (see: Figure 1) and (3) ‘The Other Market’. Using Latour’s framing of uncertainties (Huybrechts, Dreessen & Schepers, 2015), we illustrate how the interventions made uncertainties related to actors, actions and objects/matters tangible and how (long-term) participation was enhanced or obstructed in the process (cfr. the above-mentioned approach).

Our contribution takes on the form of an extended article and a live, participatory presentation of visualisations of the process, documenting how diverse constellations of actors, actions and matters of concern (Latour, 2005) take form and shift through the interventions over time. We specifically focus on the uncertainties that are associated with these constellations to gain an understanding of how interventions enhance or obstruct the infrastructuring process.

RAIN, Zeitraum Göteborg, I want to be Mixed Down as a Frequency (Interfaith Confession) CHAIR: Kristina Hagström Ståhl

Gerhard EckelNathan Witt

RAIN

by Kajsa G. Eriksson and Fredric Gunve

– the never ending evolution of natureculture

It is raining!

RAIN is a future environmental disaster, and a mythic story about adaptation in the never ending evolution of natureculture. Through performances, workshops, readings and an artist book with five chapters and 44 printed cards, this never ending rain continues to fall, and through the falling the conditions for all activities are shaped, changed and transformed. This performative rain is intra-acting with the everyday lives of all life. RAIN is a performative presence during a period of two months in an area of Dalsland, Sweden.

The rain falling in RAIN is not a moral natural rain, but rather a rain with agency imposing on every little detail of an everyday life. In RAIN the nature/culture binary is questioned and through performativity rain becomes that which evolves and transforms humans, environments, social relations and whole situations. In RAIN sustainability is embedded and embodied as a survival tactic. RAIN is acting on an invented set of structures and causalities and through that assure us, as artists and educators, that change and transformation is possible. This transformation and invention is part of a “deep time” and Elizabeth Grosz adds “Time, as simultaneously virtual and actual, past and present, will continue in precisely its own way, even without the presence of the human.” The rain will keep on falling with or without us humans.

RAIN will be exhibited at Gallery BOX, between 16 October – 15 November 2015 http://galleribox.se. There through the chapters: WATER, THE FAMILY, THE VILLAGE, THE UNIVERSITY and MEMORY CARD material results, discussions, seminars and other forms of documentation will be introduced and exhibited.

Art Work:

CHAPTER 4: THE UNIVERSITY

CARD no: 36

Following the outside of the house and along the water gates and into the jungle hallway lays a long wooden log decorated with different metals. It is a fifteen meter long art piece, an aesthetical and educational narrative about an ongoing now and a past now lost. The wood is slowly drying and rotting, moist is processing one end and the drying the other. The metal parts are oxidizing and moves as the wood slowly twist, turn and rot. A grey brown wood color meets the black treated iron while other parts are allowed to corrode and fall apart. Along the damp and damaged log, iron and copper in different color shades from red to green are flowing. The section of the log which is partly outside and partly inside are decorated with different green moss and fungus which are growing frantically. The mummification and moldering are colliding in a material paradox of preservation and progress which are chafing and tearing. This is the big question for the university. To protect, isolate or evolve?

Zeitraum

by Gerhard Eckel

Zeitraum (German for ‘timespan’, literally ‘time space’) is a sound environment exposing the interrelation of time and space in acoustic communication. The environment is composed of many identical sound sources dispersed irregularly in a large space, playing an aleatoric ostinato of percussive sounds. When listened to from a particular location (the sweet spot), the pattern is perceived as an accented but isochronous beat. The ostinato is structured such that the sounds from all sources arrive with the same delay at the sweet spot, compensating for the differences in propagation time. When walking away from the sweet spot, the regular pulse gets more and more distorted as the distances to all sound sources change and with them the propagation delays from the sources to the listener. What starts as almost imperceptible deviations and passes through various areas with different kinds of grooves, ends up in a rhythmically completely disrupted and apparently chaotic sequence of events when listened to from far off the sweet spot. By moving about the space, the audience explores a space literally made out of time, a time space – a bewildering experience enacted through one’s locomotion, revealing the always baffling relativity of observation. With Zeitraum an aesthetic formulation of some of the basic constraints shaping the composition of spatial sound textures has been found, while touching upon fundamental conceptual and artistic conditions of possibility in electroacoustic music and sound art. The work exists in various formulations, one of which is this description. Zeitraum Göteborg (2015) is a reformulation of Zeitraum Graz (2013), which marked the end point of a series of case studies I conducted in the course of the artistic research project ‘The Choreography of Sound’ (Austrian Science Fund FWF, PEEK AR41). Zeitraum received a Honorary Mention from the Prix Ars Electronica 2015 in the category Digital Musics and Sound Art.

 

I want to be Mixed Down as a Frequency (Interfaith Confession)

by Nathan Witt

Living and working to different times

Following a visit Jerusalem in 2012, I was thinking about the social separation in the working week, found in the religious quarters of the Old City. In terms of the different times each religion rests, socialises and also the differing year zero’s, the epoch, that each religion circumnavigates. That one year is 2012, the other 1433 and the other 5722; that the world’s religion’s cannot collectively agree on such a fundamentally simple thing as to what year it is – or when to work and rest. A continuous long-playing Gmail Calendar feed, which was set to Hebrew Ha’luach, Islamic Hijri and Christian Gregorian and now includes a Persian Lunar Solar Calendar and a Julian Calendar of Days.

The piece tries to remain as an existential approach to living and working to conflicting religious times and in the context of inter-subjectivity, as a vernacularized inter-religious dromological confession that wonders about the impact on everyday life, how we experience and live through any particular disparities and the adjustments we make, whether cognitively or mathematically, or through wholesale calendrical reform.

In the every day streaming of shared daily communal activity; of the emotionally and financially uneconomical labour of prosumerism, this piece has focused on the notion of simultaneously working, seemingly in reverse, for nothing – and sharing everything with our communal and veritable partners. This aspect was heavily influenced by Pedro Neves’ text Curatorial Business, on Donald Tapscott’s concept of the prosumer. The essay questions the conceits of collectivity and shared activity, especially the traditional concept of valorisation amongst our veritable partners. The continuous stream shows the banal collectivised activities, if any, and much like a social network feed, but set to 5 disparate religious epochs. The calendar has been streaming on a tumblr account since October 2012 to show these activities independently and off-site.

Doing Away With the Nostalgia for Evil for Good

Jalal Toufic

Moderator: Kristina Hagström Ståhl

Catastrophes such as the atomic devastation of Hiroshima in 1945, the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the harsh sanctions imposed on Iraq between the two Gulf Wars and that contributed to the additional deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, undermine the “will.” Who or how many can will the eternal recurrence of such catastrophes? Nazi Germany, seemingly an episode of the triumph of the will (the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 documentary on the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934), was, through the concentration and extermination camps, a cryptic fundamental attack on it. Evil is nostalgic; how much nostalgia, a symptom of the absence or desuetude of the will, have the concentration and extermination camps produced! Nietzsche’s “The question posed to each thing you do, ‘Do you will this once more and countless times more?’” (The Gay Science, no. 341) is to be read as an ethical injunction to do without nostalgia, to do away with it; only that whose eternal recurrence is willed does not produce nostalgia. Nostalgia is basically less a yearning for the repetition of an event than an indication that one did not will the event, that is, did not “will” its eternal recurrence.
Nostalgia reveals not only what I feel now about a past event, but also how I “willed” that event when it happened in the past: I did not “will” its eternal recurrence. When it is not merely psychological, nostalgia is basically a facet of the present event; with regard to any event toward which I feel nostalgic, I know that I did not “will” its eternal recurrence when it happened. We are nostalgic beings less—if at all—because we are creatures who remember in an ostensibly transient present than because we do not will events.

4 Parallel presentations 60 min:

Elements of Performance Art. The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes Conversation between Anthony Howell and Jason Bowman. CHAIR: Mick Wilson

Anthony HowellJason E. Bowman

Re-activating Elements of Performance Art by The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes, with founder Anthony Howell.

In the days immediately preceding the PARSE Conference, founder of The Theatre of Mistakes, Anthony Howell has conducted a workshop re-activating exercises from his and Fiona Templeton’s 1976 publication Elements of Performance Art.

This session provides a unique opportunity to watch the consequences of a workshop that derives from that publication, The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes’ ethos and methods of production are outlined in Elements of Performance Art against six convergent elements: conditions, body, aural, time/space, equipment and manifestation with a total of 42 exercises to be structured via chance allowing for multiple formations.

Instigated by Anthony Howell, a poet and dancer, The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes was an interdisciplinary UK-based collective formed in 1974, which disbanded in 1981. Their foundational work was generated through a series of openly advertised events and happenings at which, from 1974-1976, attendees co-developed a series of game-based exercises via instructional rules, which were collectively recorded as The Gymnasium. By 1976 these exercises had been refined and published by Anthony Howell and Fiona Templeton as Elements of Performance. It’s highly limited edition remains out of print despite its potential to be considered as the first manifesto-manual for Performance Art to have been generated in the UK.

In July 2017, Valand Academy’s MFA: Fine Art Programme Leader, Jason E. Bowman will curate the first career survey of the work of the Theatre of Mistakes at London’s Raven Row Gallery. This workshop forms part of the curatorial research process for that initiative, considering the question of how one may one may curate a survey exhibition of the work of a now disbanded performance collective.

16.30

Nongkrong and Collectivity in Yogyakarta’s Contemporary Arts, On the heater? CHAIR: Dave Beech

Sonja DahlSuzanne Caines

Nongkrong and Collectivity in Yogyakarta’s Contemporary Arts:

by Sonja Dahl

In Praise of Non-Productive Time

Literally translated, the Indonesian word nongkrongapproximates “squatting by the side of the road with a cigarette” or “sitting around because you’re not doing any work.” Though it’s tempting to judge such activity as a waste of time, the process of nongkrong (essentially, non-productive social time) actually serves a very important role in building social relationships in Indonesia. It describes the act of hanging out, of bodies leaning into space together, of social, mutual space and slow time. Nongkrong is the hum of relationships, an activity that through its ubiquity, especially in Java, acts as social ‘glue.’

Within the contemporary arts circuit in Yogyakarta, Java, an incredible proliferation of artist collectives and collaborations support the vast number of young and emerging artists. For many of Yogya’s artists, nongkrong is an essential aspect of how both their art practices and communities function and flourish. In the words of one such artist, “Nongkrong is our school.” Its looseness allows for an open and generous exchange of ideas and information, a casual knowledge-share that many artists claim is more influential on their development than their educations in school. Rather than focusing on end-product productivity, nongkrong offers a holistic view of art as a long-term social process.

Taking the Indonesian concept of nongkrong as its pivot point, this paper extends the idea outwards from its specific locality to think through the importance of such non-productive social time in the broader contemporary arts. I draw on the work of a number of scholars and theorists, most particularly Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, who conceptualize ‘study’ as an informal social process and collective intellectual practice. I contend that the casual hanging out entailed in nongkrong supports collaboration and defines what is at once a representative thread of contemporaneity in art worldwide at this historical moment, and a peculiarly and vibrantly Indonesian form of collective practice.

 

On the heater?

by Suzanne Caines

My performance exists as a reading of a transcription from a Research Symposium, held 4-6 March 2013 at 
Goldsmiths, New Cross, London. The symposium existed as a 72 hour video brought together by the reading group called ‘Escapologies’. I was hired to transcribe 7.5 hours of recorded material from the 72 hour event. This paper will consist of 
reading the transcribed material in which I was paid 375 pounds to transcribe. This transcription consists of 27,683 words and 24 hours of labor time in which the transcription took. This project questions artistic labor and how it is valued in the context of neo-liberalism. When read and performed in the space of this conference what will happen to this material’s temporality? This material was complicated therefore it had several voices speaking simultaneously and cannot be transcribed in a traditional manner. This transcription was produced a multi-layered piece of text.

The time of seeing and being seen CHAIR: Cecilia Lagerström

Jana Unmüßig

Moderator: Kristina Hagström Ståhl

The time of seeing and being seen

Jana Unmüßig, based in Berlin, choreographer, doctoral student at UNIARTS Helsinki. Her choreographic work has been presented internationally. For more info: www.jana-unmussig.com

Practical inquiry into how time is experienced in the doing of bodily seeing. No previous moving experience required, but come in some clothes you feel comfortable in. Short section of somatic body work is followed by task-based exercises experimenting with seeing things in space asking the question, “What if when I see what I see is a doing that touches me in a way that my everyday sense of time is altered?”

Translating 51 days, Exhibition, Fiction and its Ghosts CHAIR: Ingrid Elam

Somaya El-SousiHanna HallgrenJenny Tunedal

Translating 51 days

by Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna Hallgren and Jenny Tunedal

In the summer of 2014 poets Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna Hallgren and Jenny Tunedal were working together in a translation workshop via skype that had been ongoing for more than a year. When war broke out in Gaza, where El-Sousi lives and works, this translation workshop transformed into a daily conversation on war, despair, food, rooms, objects, women, children, mothers, intimacy, fear, news, weather and writing.

The differences and distances always present in translation work became enhanced and acute, as did a sense of closeness. The circumstances of war cut into our work and somehow into the everyday quotidian life of Sweden; as a shock, as a difference, as an acute experience of a lack of experience. The computer screen became, in El-Sousis words: “a blue window of hope”; the hope of continuing, linearity, future.

Continuity is complicated for anyone living in Gaza. Life is a secluded incarceration not only in space but maybe even more so in time. Future as well as political and personal history are constantly being cut off from and / or conditioned by a claustrophobic present. The disaster that war is adds enormous pressure and fear to this present, to the extend were chronological time seems almost entirely dissolved.

We would like to examine this sense of time and how it conditions the work of female writers in Gaza. We have gathered literary texts by women living in Gaza that were written during the 51 days of war and aim to perform a reading of how the temporality of war becomes readable, and possibly shareable, in these texts; as structure, as experience, as knowledge, as the unanswerable question: ”How long is that night, how hard is that darkness?” (from Somaya El-Sousis “It does not end”, written in late July 2014)

Our work and our friendship takes place on skype. During the conference we would like to use skype and together, yet apart, perform a poetic conversation piece on the temporality of war, of literature, of translation and of friendship.

18.00

View performance and installation work at A-Venue: Right Here and at HSM: Re-activating Elements of Performance Art, Zeitraum Göteborg, I want to be Mixed Down as a Frequency (Interfaith Confession), For years to come

Day 3 - Friday6 Nov 2015

The conflict of urban synchronicity and its heterotemporalities, Time for an Urban(Re)evolution, A text about urban eating shaping formless architecture on Värnhemstorget in Malmö CHAIR: Maria Nyström

Rodrigo Delso GutiérrezAtxu Amann y AlcocerAnna Maria Orru

The conflict of urban synchronicity and its heterotemporalities:

by Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez and Atxu Amann y Alcocer

the Asynchronous Citizenship.

Eighteen or sixty-five years old, fifty years contributions, three months maternity leave, three years degree, forty hours a week, eight hours a day, two hours data download, fifteen minutes away or five hours far from the city. Time, in this context, does not only appoint the dissected measure of seconds, minutes or years but provides the syntaxes where contemporary architecture and urbanism structure the specific spatio-temporalities of cities, buildings, inhabitants and their ways of living. Consequently, the increasing desynchronization of space and an ongoing synchronization of time are shaping a process that erodes the diversity of our lives and simultaneously expanding the differences between ones and the “others”, who cannot share the market velocity.

In the following article, the conflict of synchronicity will be visibilised within contemporary cities through its notions of heterogeneity –chronopolitics-, power –syncropolitics-, repetition –rhythmpolitics– and speed –acceleratiopolitics-, as an emerging field of action to be explored by architects, artists or designers. Also, the notion of “asynchronous citizenship” will be explored referring it to all those strategies that claim for alternative forms of urban synchronization and fight, consciously or not, against actual temporal dynamics within cities.

 

Time for an Urban(Re)evolution

by Anna Maria Orru

– Negotiating Body, Space and Food

Food occurs rhythmically and permeates a major part of everyday, it is rarely considered in urban design. This highlights a missing link in the food/time rapport with urban space and how the body relates to it, in which the concept of a cyclical process has been suppressed from the urban experience. In order to confront this, this paper explores and evaluates the artistic method of butoh. Butoh sheds light on how the inclusion of embodiment within imagineering can emphasize the timely aspect of urban space and food production as a cyclical process. Imagineering is a design technique that uses narrative to generate an imagined emergence of a concept. By placing the body at the centre of my methodology, I explore the negotiation it takes with time, space and food. I pose a question: How can the interaction of the body in butoh practice and food production, set in relation to one another, improve the understanding and handling of urban space where time becomes an aspect in design? My methodology is framed in micro and macro perspective lenses, where the butoh body is brought into the process of shaping urban environment through techniques such as: Rebellion, interaction, mimesis, agro-roots, transformation, metamorphosis and reflection. The micro lens is explored through the bodily choreography and detail of body technique in a butoh dance performance at the AHA festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. The macro lens is implementd in an experimental-making of an ecological living system and foodscape called ‘Paperscapes,’ which becomes the stage for that performance. These embodiments of making and performing induce imagineering, drawn from biomimicry, to enable an imagined emergence of another way of approaching urban green space. In deciphering the butoh body in its spatial to corporeal relationship, the Japanese spatio-temporal concept of ma – an interval, gap, opening, awareness – helps understand how temporal progression relies on space awareness, spatial progression relies on time, and the potential transformation which exists in this ‘interval’. The use of butoh exposes the landscape in an ‘circular-timed’ orientation and this sheds light on the transformation of everyday collective ‘rhythms’ and behaviour with food.

 

A text about urban eating shaping formless architecture on Värnhemstorget in Malmö.

Somebody has left a half full beer can on the stairs. A man picks it up, shakes it easily, looks around, takes a zip and keeps on walking. I don’t think it was originally his.

In many cities temporal aspects of city life has risen on the agenda of policy makers, temporal activities have become popular in planning, attention has also been pointed to time as an indicator of wealth, some people have more time than others, one can buy time, in the form of, for example, house hold services (Mückenberger, 2011). In the field of urban design the focus over the past years has been on events and temporary use as a planning tool for activating or boosting urban areas, but the knowledge on how the physical environment relate to temporality in everyday life and also how the everyday affect the physical environment is less researched. The aim of this paper is to trace informal architectures, temporarily assembled in specific situations, and produced in direct relation to public life in cities. One activity that relates both directly to public design but also to the changing temporal landscapes of the city dwellers is public eating which can be seen as a mediator that helps reveal situations where the temporal aspects of architecture become visible. Eating is deeply connected to rhythms, both internal, biological such as feeling hungry or thirsty as well as cultural and social rhythms connecting, for example to when and where we eat

Deep Decay, Time Unknown, Synchronizing Uncertainty CHAIR: Catharina Dyrssen

Andy WeirAnna SalamonBrian House

Deep Decay:

by Andy Weir

Into Dia-chronic Polychromatic Material Fictions

The deep geological repository project for the long-term storage of radioactive material opens an encounter between design processes in the present and the ‘deep time’ of 4.46 billion year futures. Beyond debates around ethics of responsibility to future generations, this paper argues, this invokes a more radical futurity, where human thought confronts its contingency alongside nuclear timescales. Art practices play a key ‘stakeholder’ role in imagining repository sites, in a context where they are both rooted in materialities of stochastic decay process and necessarily subject to interdisciplinary transformation. This paper asks what specific knowledge art practices could give us in this context. What are their potentials and problems? And what could this mean for the historical conditions of ‘contemporary art’?

It does this through departing from the 2010 film Into Eternity and its production of awe-struck ineffability through cinematic allusion to massive duration. Deep radiological times are proposed instead not as ‘eternity’ but as ‘very large finitude’ (Morton), not immeasurable but as call to develop art practice through collective experimentation and technological augmentation. This extends Nick Srnicek’s proposal for an ‘aesthetics of the interface’ as a making operational of complex data through making it amenable to the senses, and sketches some propositions informing current practical work – drawing on multiple tools and technologies of future modelling as partial models or ‘fictions’ (Laruelle), deployments of abductive reasoning, and a performative materiality of media as critical interrogation of its own interfacing technology.

 

Time Unknown:

by Anna Salamon

Unforgiving Imprints, or Forgetful?

This talk will seek to materially and linguistically manifest complex temporal dimensions associated with the painterly imprints. Steering away from linear notions of time fundamental to representationalism(s) in Karen Barad terms, it will unveil the temporal collapse evident in the material instantaneity of analogue imprints, combining an artist talk, a scholarly paper and a performative intervention into the duration of the talk.

In my research, painting is understood as a place where material and immaterial processes can be witnessed simultaneously, rather than a signifying or mimetic activity. Consequently, the only two moments which can be justifiably differentiated – the moment of making/touching and the moment of viewing — are variations, variants, fragmentary viewpoints of the same instant.

I will be querying Luce Irigaray’s proposition that painting ‘makes time simultaneous’ in order to focus on tactile relations in time rather than visual relations in space. I will also be referring to Heidegger’s Augenblick, a moment of vision — or a moment of touch – to explore the material remembrance of the analogue imprint in relation to the forgetfulness of digital encoding. How does the material instantaneity of the imprint, deemed technologically obsolete, holds the potential to incarnate paradoxical aspects of new materialist understanding of time and temporality? Non-dialectical clusters and families of words need to be introduced in order to navigate time from a new materialist viewpoint.

This presentation will feature an instantaneous launch and the spatio-temporal distribution of material (im)prints on paper thorough the duration of the talk, as well as documentation of an ongoing work titled Eight Hours (2011-ongoing), composed of a volume of mono-types on archival tissue produced throughout the length of a working day.

 

Synchronizing Uncertainty:

by Brian House

Google’s Spanner and the Foreclosure of Time

In my practice as a media artist and musician, I frequently represent “big data” through sound. This has prompted a parallel, theory-driven investigation into the relationship between temporality and databases. In this proposed paper-presentation for PARSE, I investigate the particular way in which the very notion of time is restructured by contemporary, large-scale, network-distributed databases, exemplified by the largest of all, Google’s Spanner. Deployed in 2012, Spanner obfuscates temporal uncertainty in a way that concretizes what I identify as an emerging cultural sense about how space, time, and data are entangled.

I employ a triple methodology. First, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s media archaeological approach to the hard disk drive and the concept of “random access” serves as a template for diagramming technology on the far larger scale of the distributed database, in which random access happens on a geographic scale. I propose that such infrastructure constitutes a timekeeping device in itself, which necessitates an examination of what it means to “keep time”. For that I turn to a historical approach and Peter Galison’s account of clock synchronization and its tie to industrialization and modernism, and I extend this genealogy to contemporary network cables, GPS, data centers, and Google’s specific innovations with Spanner. Finally, I draw on the work of Anna Munster and an art and cultural studies perspective to expand on the ontological, political, and aesthetic implications of large-scale data and the synchronic temporal conception that they engender.

10.00

TEMPORARY METEMPSYCHOSIS MAY OCCUR BUT MUST NOT BECOME PERMANENT (performance lecture with walk at the Gothenburg Art Museum)

TEMPORARY METEMPSYCHOSIS MAY OCCUR BUT MUST NOT BECOME PERMANENT

by Members of the Research Consortium ESTAR(SER)

The artists-collective and research-consortium known as ESTAR(SER) is an international community of scholar/researchers working to sift evidences of “practices of attention” (often to works of art) in the historical record, and to present those evidences to critical readers—while offering occasions for willing participants to experiment with many of these lost or marginal techniques of “practical aesthesis.”

An ESTAR(SER) working group has recently uncovered new evidence of an interesting cohort of eccentric individuals engaged in such attentive practices in Los Angeles in the mid twentieth century—hyper-durational practices of that involved experimentation with radical techniques of “extreme” or “psychotic” seeing and close control of the eyes themselves.

At the 2015 PARSE Symposium, members of ESTAR(SER) will offer a performance lecture and experimental “attentional exercise” to introduce participants to this lost history and to these radical, time-intensive practices for engaging with works of art.

12.00

Discuss Masquerade by Vermeir & Hieremans (2015, c. 55mins)

In their practice Vermeir & Heiremans define their own home, a loft apartment in Brussels, as an artwork. Whilst keeping their home private, they use it to create ‘mediated extensions’: translations to installations, videos, performances, publications… that generate a public hyper-visibility for their domestic space.

Art House Index (AHI–) is a new ‘extension’ that proposes the transformation of ‘the home as an artwork’ into a financial instrument. A financial index measures the performance of a specific part of the economy i.e. Dow Jones, S&P500… Measuring the value of the Art House and the artists’ brand, (AHI–) has the potential to render an opaque static product that is difficult to trade, like a house or art, into a tool of measurement that is very transparent for many investors.

In their new film MASQUERADE, a TV-reporter is telling the story of the protested ‘initial public offering’ (IPO) of (AHI–). While she is addressing the camera, what appears to be a reconstruction of the IPO, is taking place in the background. And then it all starts going wrong again! Is the audience witnessing an insider-sales in an auction house, a market crash in a trading pit or is it a hearing in a courtroom, one that tries to unveil the intricate dynamics of a confidence game?

Art, like finance, is a system of belief and their markets are where this belief is put to work. MASQUERADE is a film that focuses on the methodologies of the contemporary art market, using Melville’s novel The Confidence Man as the structure for its episodic narration. In presenting MASQUERADE Vermeir & Heiremans use the financial market as a producer of the narrative. The actual performance of (AHI–), showing the index going up or down, triggers-in ‘real financial time’ a switch between two MASQUERADE versions, one of which shows the ‘finished’ film while the other captures variations, rehearsals and failures.

14.00

Simonetta Carbonaro talk and discussion led by Lisbeth Svengren-Holm

Simonetta Carbonaro

Every time I’m confronted with the problem of Time, I cannot help but escape into memory (that past form of time) and recall a powerful reading from my youth.

“What is time? A mystery, a figment–and all powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say a thing is ‘brought about’ by time. What sort of thing? Change! Now is not then, here is not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is circular, is in a closed circle; and might almost equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement — for the there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present. Furthermore, as our utmost effort cannot conceive a final limit either to time or in space, we have settled to think of them as eternal and infinite — apparently in the hope that if this is not very successful, at least it will be more so than the other…”   (Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Chap. IV, Changes — in Castorp’s mind)

Just a few days ago, while looking at one of the latest Calvin Klein spots on YouTube, I was thinking: “How dull are our times. Tasteless, banal and full of stereotypes. All about youthfulness and pseudo-erotics, offered wholesale.

But then I changed my mind.

I can see that the banality of that ad’s claim, Eternity Now, actually gets right to the heart of the real time we are immersed in.

It’s a kind of spa-notion, where time and space vanish.

A thermal-bath-concept, into which we are plunging daily.

A hot spot, where what happens here is happening there, and at the same time.

A GPS spot, where time-motion has taken the shape of the digital instant.

Exactly that simultaneity is what makes us feel that we have no time.

And when we are missing time, we are also missing space.

Is this the reason for that kind of wanderer nostalgia that goes into our bones, animal bones of a new generation of mutants, who know everything just by being nailed to the keyboards of our PCs, or the touch-screens of our tablets and cell-phones? New Nomads who virtually ramble, roam, stray and gallivant all over without going anywhere?

Yes, Eternity Now smells like a warm vaporous emptiness, plays like the name of a new millennium illness, a new malady of our souls.

15.00

La confesión

Coco Fusco

Moderator: Erling Björgvinsson

La confesión

A video by Coco Fusco

The Cuban Revolution is an historical phenomenon known throughout the world through iconic images and dramatic political performances. In my recent works on Cuba, I have tried to delve into stories that have become legends but lack visualization, either because they were not documented by the state or because their documentation has been censored.

La confesión is a reflection on the most significant crisis in the intellectual history of the Cuban Revolution – the public confession by poet Heberto Padilla that he was a counterrevolutionary. Pronounced in April of 1971 before an audience of his peers at the Artists and Writers Union in Havana after the poet had been held for five weeks in Villa Marista prison, Padilla’s confession shifted the terms of New Left tough about the role of culture in revolution, and reconfigured the relationship between European intellectuals and third world nationalism. It continues to cast a shadow over Cuban cultural life.

Many Cubans were accused of ideological diversionism in the 1960s and 1970s but suffered punishment in anonymity. Padilla was a prize-winning author with an international following who had worked in the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States. He was an early supporter of the Cuban revolution who became a political enfant terrible. In 1971, the Cuban government attempted to exploit the poet’s fame

by enjoining him to denounce himself on camera before an audience, but the effort to make him an example backfired when the international outcry in the wake of the confession turned Padilla into a cause celebre.

My video is not a dramatic reconstruction of the event: it is a consideration of the ways in which Padilla’s performance as a repentant counter-revolutionary reverberates to this day. I concentrate in my piece on the documents that form the material residue of the case, including a fragment of the filmed confession that was made public only recently.

Marshalling Time, Kairos Time CHAIR: Andrea Phillips

Andrew DewdneyVictoria WalshEmma Cocker

Moderator: Erling Björgvinsson

Marshalling Time:

by Andrew Dewdney and Victoria Walsh

Distributed Aesthetics and the Purification of Hybrids in the 21stCentury Art Museum

How are artists, curators and theorists responding to the new conditions of hypermodernity and chrono-reflexivity within the spaces and time of the art museum? Marked by a distributed archival aesthetic, post-digital culture directly challenges the museum’s logic of collection, as well as exposing the flaws of the atemporal modernist aesthetic hang.

Art museums have responded to this situation through asserting the temporal specificity of ‘exhibition’. During the performance and event programme of the Tate Tanks in 2013, Chris Dercon described the museum of the 21st century as ‘a new kind of mass medium’ – defined by the durational practices of artists, interactive audience technology and social media, and online broadcast and archival practices. Such a description, whilst recognising a convergence of art and media practices, does not yet recognise the temporal paradoxes that are emerging from network culture which is everywhere busily inverting the foundational logic of the museum as a place of aggregation and object display.

While curators talk of new opportunities for curating, commissioning and collaborating with artists in ‘event’ time, the museological and archival urge to freeze-frame and rematerialize the elusive, ephemeral and immaterial practices of the artist for collection can be understood as one more attempt to maintain the modernist aesthetic temporal order – through what Latour describes as the purification of hybrids, which in reality proliferate faster than the speed of even the hypermodern museum.

Based on two international artistic and curatorial research projects the paper argues that the destabalisation of the historical temporal certainties of the art museum are rooted in the problematic fiction of the ‘contemporary,’ which, in the chronopolitical context of the migration of people, data, and objects, can no longer hold.

The paper will particularly draw on the collaborative research undertaken by the Curating Contemporary Art Programme at the RCA with the artists Lawrence Abu-Hamdan, Kader Attia, Camille Henrot, and Leo Asemota and the RCA / Tate research collaboration focused on the role and impact of the digital at Tate.

 

Kairos Time:

by Emma Cocker

The Performativity of Timing and Timeliness … or; Between Biding One’s Time and Knowing When to Act

This paper investigates contemporary performance and artistic practice through the prism of kairos, a concept that in spite of the ‘temporal turn’ within arts/humanities – and its familiarity within literary/rhetorical studies – has remained relatively under-interrogated in relation to artistic making/thinking. Kairos is an Ancient Greek term meaning a fleeting opportunity that needs to be grasped before it passes: not an abstract measure of time passing (chronos) but of time ready to be seized, an expression of timeliness, a critical juncture or ‘right time’ where something could happen. Kairos has origins in two different sources as Eric Charles White notes: archery – “an opening … through which the archer’s arrow has to pass”, and weaving – the “ ‘critical time’ when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp” (1987, p.13). The Ancient Greek art of technē (referring to a ‘productive/tactical’ knowledge, rather than ‘craft’) is underpinned by the principles of kairos (opportune timing) & mêtis (cunning intelligence). Alternatively, for philosopher Antonio Negri, kairòs refers to the ‘restless’ instant where naming and the thing named attain existence (in time), for which he draws example from the way that the poet “vacillating, fixes the verse” (2003, p.153.) Drawing Negri’s writing on the ‘revolutionary time’ of kairos (alongside Bergson’s concept of the ‘gap’ or interval) into dialogue with Ancient Greek rhetoric, this paper elaborates the significance of kairos to contemporary art practice and critical imagination, identifying various artistic practices that operate as contemporary manifestations of Ancient technē, or analogously to Negri’s ‘poet’: practices alert/attentive to the live circumstances or ‘occasionality’ of their own making, based on kairotic principles of immanence, intervention & invention-in-the-middle.

White, E.C. (1987). Kaironomia: On the Will to Invent,Cornell University Press.
Negri, N. (2003). Time for Revolution, New York and London, Continuum

Time, Process and Innovation in Colonial Encounters, The Archeology of Counterinsurgency CHAIR: Johan Öberg

Per CornellNicola PeruginiSamir HarbMimi Cabell

Time, Process and Innovation in Colonial Encounters

by Per Cornell

In the violent and abusive colonial context, time is a crucial factor. In certain cases, in a wide colonial context, there may be active indigenous projects, even a process of social innovation among the colonized. The traditional discussions concerning the colonial only addressed the power of the colonizer, and, to the extent the colonized was addressed it was as the victims of a history, to which they contributed little or nothing. The evident question arising from the postcolonial debate, not least Spivak’s, Colombres’ and Düssel’s discussion is the question of what history could be. De Beauvoir’s early and decisive arguments on the other are highly relevant here. In order to argue for a general history it must include conflict, difference and variability as parts of the historical process. However, the logics of such a history cannot be limited to one set of actors or social settings, but rather focus on the interactions or lack of interactions between different social settings. Time and timing is crucial. Mainly discussing cases from two regions of the Americas, several aspects of time will be addressed. Involved is Derrida’s chronospatial discussion and Marx’ arguments on the historical process, in which process creates entities. Toscano (2010) has argued on the importance of “real abstraction” in Marx, but we are still far from getting at the way such factors intervene in the intricacy of a colonial encounter. When times meet, it is about what, in the grand theory of traditional humanities, could not link in any conceivable way, beyond full and complete appropriation from one side over another. Thus, as Derrida discussed it, how is it that encounters between different times can produce social effects? Can there be new and different ways of writing history, in which conflicted time is crucial? Would this affect the way of the political?

The Archeology of Counterinsurgency

by Nicola Perugini, Samir Harb and Mimi Cabell

The Archeology of Counterinsurgency is a collaboration between artist and architect Samir Harb, Middle Eastern studies scholar and political theorist Nicola Perugini, and artist and writer Mimi Cabell. We are currently creating an archive of material that traces the literal and symbolic history of the Tegart forts in Israel and Palestine through multiple systems of design ‑ architecture, the sites themselves, and the language that designed the conditions under which the forts were built, and continues to design their existence. These militarized forts, known today as Mukataa’s, were planned in the 1930’s by British engineer and police officer Sir Charles Tegart to suppress the Palestinian revolt.

After the end of the British Mandate and the creation of Israel, the forts faced different destinies. Many are still in operation today as Israeli prisons, administrative offices, and national heritage sites; the Mukataa in Ramallah, Palestine houses Yasser Arafat’s tomb, serves as the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, and acts as the official West Bank office of Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the State of Palestine. The project is an archeology of these different historical trajectories, an attempt to understand what keeps together their heterogeneity

 

16.30

Shuffling times talk and discussion with Benedikte Zitouni led by Valeire Pihet

Benedikte Zitouni

Shuffling times is an ill-considered practice inside academia (and perhaps elsewhere too). Manipulating the past for present purposes, reading the future from days gone by, is considered lax at best and devious at worst. Agreed: shuffling times is risky business. Too often, the so-called “learning from the past” becomes synonymous of accepting both present and future. What has been shall be. What is now, was actually meant to be. Determinism and fatalism are risks that should not be handled carelessly. Yet, shuffling times is what we need to do.

Taking the cue from Bruno Latour’s notion that we are brewers and assemblers of temporalities, and from Audrey Lorde’s notion that we cannot take down the master’s house with the master’s tools, I will revisit a tale on territorial change which I know well (for having written a PhD on it). Today that tale calls for experimentation. What of territorial change and aggregation? How to write a particular past, of collective urban ingenuity, into the present? How to avoid Modernity’s timeline (a master’s tool if any) which has dispirited and obliterated so many stories?

The experimentation is not done for its own sake. Shuffling times holds a promise. Emancipation might lie in our capacity of learning again how to make our own times, i.e. how to assemble the events and elements of know-how that are required for today. Mixing past, present and future might resuscitate many more stories than those we have at hand presently. It might thereby broaden the very parameters of change. For many stories are still missing. Past territorial ingenuity has been crushed by strict past-present-future sequences. Today, other sequences must be brewed.

Conference Committee

Conference Coordination
Mina Dennert Project Manager

Erik Jeppsson Technical Manager

Andrea Phillips Curator

The International Scientific Committee 
Darla Crispin, Associate Professor, The Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo
Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy, New School, NY
Bruno Latour, Professor, Institut d’Études Politiques, Paris
Prof. Lou Yongqi, Dean, College of Design & Innovation, Tongji University
Andrea Phillips, PARSE Professor of Art, University of Gothenburg
Valérie Pihet, Sciences Po Paris
Henk Slager, Dean MaHKU, and Professor of Artistic Research, University of the Arts, Utrecht

The National Scientific Committee
Magnus Bärtås, Professor, The University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm
Barbara Czarniawska, Professor, The Gothenburg Research Institute
Catharina Dyrssen, Professor, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg
Lars Hallnäs, Professor, The Swedish School of Textiles, Borås
Ola Sigurdson, Professor, The University of Gothenburg

The Local Scientific Committee
Erling Björgvinsson, PARSE Professor of Design, HDK – School of Design and Crafts
Henric Benesch, Head of Subject, Design, HDK – School of Design and Crafts
Jason E. Bowman, Fine Art Programme Leader and Head of Subject, Fine Art, the Valand Academy
Ingrid Elam, Professor, and Dean of the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts
Kristina Hagström Ståhl, PARSE Professor of  Performative Arts, Academy of Music and Drama
Anders Hultqvist, Professor, Academy of Music and Drama
Cecilia Lagerström, Professor, Academy of Music and Drama
Maria Nyström, Professor, HDK – School of Design and Crafts
Mick Wilson, Head of the Valand Academy
Johan Öberg, Senior Adviser for Research, Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts

 

Contributors

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Atxu Amann y Alcocer

Atxu Amann y Alcocer, doctor architect and urban planner woman, is professor at Madrid School of Architecture from 1990, where he teaches different subjects concerning design in grade and postgraduate studies. In 2009 he got the Educational Innovation Award by the Polytechnic University in Madrid due to new pedagogies linked to experimental workshops including time, gender and action as key issues that are produced in her innovation group, where different urban actions have been generated and executed in public spaces in Madrid. Currently she is the responsible of the research group “Hypermedia” that develops projects to study and produce mappings of complexity focusing in space-time conflicts existing in urban environments and introducing gender and social considerations. Activities linked to both research and teaching are well known through the participation in congresses and courses in different European Universities. Besides, she works with her partners in “Extreme Temperature Architects”office that they created in 1988, having got numerous awards and recognition for their projects that have been widely published and exposed worldwide. Mother of four children, she conciliates her professional and personal tempos, making this circumstance visible as a gender and politic action about time.

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Marnie Badham

Dr Marnie Badham convenes the Master of Arts and Community Practice program at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships at the University of Melbourne. As an artist-researcher using practice-led and participatory methodologies, her expertise includes socially-engaged arts and politics of cultural measurement. She holds a Melbourne Social Equity Institute Post Doctoral Award to examine ‘the social turn’ in artist residencies. Her current research includes collaborations with scholars and cultural workers in Australia’s Northern Territory, South East Asia, the UK, and North America. Marnie presents and publishes her work internationally and maintains her arts practice through residencies and curatorial projects.

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Marc Boumeester

Dr Marc Boumeester is the Director of the AKI Academy of Art & Design, part of the ArtEZ University of the Arts. Previously, he was a researcher at Delft University of Technology, Department of Architecture, specialising in the emerging capacities of the relation between cinema and architecture. He has co-founded and led the Interactive/Media/Design Department at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag. His research focuses on the interplay between non-anthropocentric desire, socio-architectural conditions and unstable media, cinema in particular. He publishes on media-philosophy and art theory.

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Jason E. Bowman

Jason E. Bowman is an artist with a curatorial practice. He is currently a Senior Lecturer and in Fine Art at the HDK-Valand Academy where he also is the Programme Director of the MFA in Fine Art As an artist his projects interrogate the coercion of publics and counter-publics, for which he employs participation as a method. His curatorial work circulates around questions of how artistic practices may be curated, as much as what those practices produce. His research has been previously funded by the Swedish Research Council as Principal Investigator of Stretched: Expanded Notions of Artistic Practice via Artist-led Cultures (2015-20). Three exhibitions were a framework for researching how exhibition-making may be conceived of to challenge dominant limitations, within the field of curating, that often render organisational and administrative activities, modalities of collaborative artistic labour, and the production of socialities to be antecedental, process-centric or extra-artistic to how exhibition-making displays artistic practice. His next body of research departs from the question: how are people curated in art’s social turn. Jason E. Bowman: Talk to the Hand, an exhibition of prototypes for new thoughts and for previous thoughts being re-thought opens at Galleri Cora Hillerbrand, Gothenburg, Sweden on Friday 17 November, 2023.

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Mimi Cabell

Mimi Cabell was formally trained in photography and the language arts; today she is enamored with “the image” and the different ways it can be and always is created through visual and textual grammar. She hasshown work in New York, Toronto, and Stuttgart, Germany; and presented or performed at conferences and festivals in Sao Paulo, Paris, London, Hsinchu City, Taiwan, and at MIT in Boston. Her work is held in the Mira Godard Study Centre at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany. She holds a BFA and an MFA in photography, and a second MFA in electronic writing from Brown University. She is currently Assistant Professor in Foundation Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.

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Suzanne Caines

Suzanne Caines is a London-­‐based Canadian artist who works with text, media in the public sphere. Her current work seeks to dissolve the barrier between practice and theory. While in London, Suzanne Caines has participated in major exhibitions, residencies and workshops at international venues including Tate Modern, Chisenhale Studios, Goldsmiths, The Nunnery Gallery, X Marks the Bokship, London, FreieUniversität Berlin, The Projection Gallery, Liverpool, Transmediale 2006, Berlin and Vertex List Gallery in New York. Addressing the need for continued professional development for young and emerging artists, Caines has led socially inclusive courses at NSCAD and Goldsmiths.

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Simonetta Carbonaro

Simonetta Carbonaro is an expert in consumer psychology, strategic marketing and design management. She carries out research in the area of consumer ethos and behavior, forecasting the directions consumer culture is moving in.
Since 2002 she has been a Professor in Design Management and Humanistic Marketing at the University of Borås – The Swedish School of Textiles, where she has been initiating The Design of Prosperity initiative www.thedesignofprosperity.com. Carbonaro has been teaching for more than ten years at the postgraduate design school Domus Academy in Milan and has been a Visiting Professor at The London College of Fashion for the last three years.

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Emma Cocker

Emma Cocker is a writer-artist & Reader in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, her research addresses the endeavour of creative labour, focusing on models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining willfully unresolved. Cocker’s recent writing has been published in Failure, (2010); Stillness in a Mobile World, (2011); Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, (2011); Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, (2012); On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, (2013), Reading/Feeling (2013) and Cartographies of Exile, (2015). Often working in collaboration with others artists, she has presented work at Flat Time House, London; M_HKA, Antwerp; NGBK, Berlin; Stadtpark Forum, Graz, and the AGORA Athens Biennale (2014). She is a key researcher on the PEEK funded research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil.

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Per Cornell

Per Cornell. Doctoral degree 1993, Associate Professor 2001, Professor 2013. Has worked as university teacher at all levels in Sweden, Argentina, Sri Lanka and Nicaragua, and has created new courses and programs. Has brought more than 13 doctorate students to their degree. Organised field projects, mainly in Argentina and Mexico. In the organisation of the large scale rescue archaeology operations at Nya Lödöse (Gamlestaden, Gothenburg). General Manager of several projects, eg the Frame project The Early Modern Town, financed by the Swedish Research Council. Organiser with the Architect Professor Giorgio Verdiani, University of Florence of the network AACCP on architecture and archaeology.

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Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at the European Graduate School. His many books
include Very Little… Almost NothingInfinitely DemandingThe Book of Dead PhilosophersThe Faith of the Faithless, and, with Tom McCarthy, The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. A new book on Hamlet called Stay, Illusion!, co-authored with Jamieson Webster, was published in 2013 by Pantheon Books in the US and Verso in the UK. An experimental new work, Memory Theatre, is forthcoming. Simon Critchley writes for The Guardian and is moderator of ‘The Stone’, a philosophy column in The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.

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Sonja Dahl

Sonja Dahl is an independent artist and researcher with a fluid, travelling, and collaboration-focused practice. She is a member of several ongoing collaborative projects including Craft Mystery Cult (US) and The Poetic Everyman Project (Indonesia and Australia). Her 2012-2014 research projects in Indonesia, supported by the Fulbright Foundation and Asian Cultural Council, focused on the culture of collaboration, artist collectives, and participatory projects in Yogyakarta, Java’s contemporary arts, as well as in-depth study of textile and indigo dye production in Java, Bali, Sumba, and Flores. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2012. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at Bezirksmuseum Neubau, Vienna; The Darwin Visual Arts Association, Darwin NT; and The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR. Her writing is published with Carets and Sticks Contemporary Arts online, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Dilettante.

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Annie Danis

Annie Danis works at the intersection of art and archaeology to explore sensory engagement and performance as method. Her work includes community-engaged archeological fieldwork, research, and performance that explores the relationship of objects, people, landscape, and history. She is a Ph.D. student in archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Andrew Dewdney

Professor Andrew Dewdney is a research professor and PhD supervisor working within The Centre of Media and Culture Research in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank University. He is an editorial advisory member of the journal Photographies and the Intellect Journal Philosophy of Photography. His current work brings together his expertise in new media together with that of museum studies in looking at the impact of networked culture upon forms of exhibition and display in galleries and museums. His current research is focused on the impact of online networked cultures upon analogue archives and their representations in museums and galleries. Currently he is collaborating with The Photographers’ Gallery, London, on the development of their Digital Development Strategy. He is co-author of Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum was published by Routledge in 2013.

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Katrien Dreessen

Katrien Dreessen (1980, Genk, Belgium) is a researcher at the research group Social Spaces (research unit ‘Inter-Actions’, Luca, school of arts/KULeuven), coordinator of FabLab Genk and teacher at Luca, school of Arts in Genk. She is currently involved in several projects that are situated on the intersection of design research, healthcare and open production. Furthermore, she is also conducting a Phd research on FabLabs and how these open workplaces can become places of infrastructuring.

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Gerhard Eckel

Gerhard Eckel uses sound to explore ways of world making. He aims at articulating the aesthetic and epistemic dimensions of sound art, understanding artistic experience as a hybrid of action, perception and reflection. His works are the result of research processes drawing on the practice and theory of music composition, sound art, choreography and dance, installation art, interaction design and digital instrument making. He is Professor of Computer Music and Multimedia at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz. He also serves as Affiliated Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and as Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Besides his artistic work and teaching, he leads publicly funded transdisciplinary research projects and supervises scholarly and artistic doctoral research.
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Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh studied history, photography, and visual anthropology in Paris. From 2006 to 2011, she lived in Burj al-Shamali, a refugee camp next to Sour, Lebanon where she carried out photographic research that includes a dialogical project with a group of young Palestinians, as well as archival work on family and studio photographs. Since 2008, Eid-Sabbagh has been a member of the Arab Image Foundation (www.fai.org.lb). She has been a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna since 2011. Lecture at The persistance of images, EHESS, Paris, and intervention with Necessità dei volti at Le Bal, Paris, October 2013. Performance at On Violence, Symposium of the Limerick Biennial, Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, March 2014. Artist in Residency at the Palestinian Museum, Ramallah/Birzeit, Palestine, August-November 2014. Performance at Archives Power Society, University of Fine Arts Braunschweig, Germany, February 2015

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Somaya El-Sousi

Somaya El-Sousi is a writer and researcher from Palestine.  Her first collection of poems was published in 1998 and she has since published three more books.

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Coco Fusco

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and MIT’s MLK Visiting Scholar for 2014-2015. She is a recipient of a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Mercosul, Transmediale, The London International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil and Performa05. Her works have also been shown at the Tate Liverpool, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York.

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Mara Lee Gerden

Mara Lee Gerden is a writer, novelist, and poet, currently a PhD student at Gothenburg University, Sweden, Valand Academy, Dept. of Literary Composition, Poetry and Prose. Her novel Ladies (Die Makellosen, Karl Blessing Verlag 2011) has been translated into several languages, and her latest novel Salome received the P.O Enquist Literary Prize in 2012. She is the official Swedish translator of the Canadian poet Anne Carson, and she additionally writes essays about literature and art for Swedish and Norwegian literary and critical journals as Glänta, Vagant and Ord&Bild. Her latest publications include an essay-book about the artist Eva Hesse, published by the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, and a scholarly article, “Strange times: A (queer)temporal approach to resistance and the stranger” in Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap (Journal for Gender Studies). Both her artistic practice and her academic research revolve around questions of otherness, identity, and desire.

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Lesley Gray

Lesley Gray is an American museum studies researcher based in Doha, Qatar. In addition to her undergraduate and graduate work in anthropology and art history, she holds an MA in Museum and Gallery Practice from University College London Qatar and previously worked in higher education in Qatar. She has been enrolled with University College London for a PhD in Museum Studies since 2015. Her research interests focus on the development of contemporary art scenes in the Arabian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions considered within the context of current art and social science theory and the growth of non-Western art centers. She is currently carrying out research on the impact of contemporary art and cultural development as an agent of cultural dialogue in both regions.

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Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez

Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez became a chronopath long time ago and is always implementing the temporal parameter in every project he is involved: artistic, architectural, pedagogical, sociological, political or urban. He is an architect from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (2012) that currently works at the same university as a researcher and teacher. He graduated with Honours with a final project titled “Time Micro-City” (http://nodopfc.blogspot.com.es/2012/10/microciudad-de-tiempo.html) that has been awarded and exhibited in several events and competitions. He also graduated with Honours from the Master in Advanced Architectural Projects of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (2012) with his Master´s Thesis “Disperse Variables around Global Time: Architecture and the Temporal Citizen”. His formal training was complemented at the Illinois Institute of Technology (2008) and with a Master in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University (2013) thanks to La Caixa scholarship to develop his ongoing PHD titled “ChronoPolis” (http://chronomad.tumblr.com/) that has been also awarded in the national competition Arquímedes (2014) for young researchers of Spain organized by the Ministry of Education and in the international competition Connecting Cities with its subproject “ChronoPolis in streaming” (http://chronopolis.ddns.net/).

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Hanna Hallgren

Hanna Hallgren is a poet, an associate professor of gender studies at Linnaeus University and works as a researcher in artistic research and gender studies. In 2016-2018, she was a professor of literary composition at the University of Gothenburg. Hallgren is a member of the Swedish Research Council’s committee for artistic research (2016-2021).

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Samir Harb

Samir Harb was born 1981 in Ramallah/Palestinian territories. He is an architect/cartoonist and has been working in the field of architecture and landscape planning in the West Bank since 2006. Harb’s project focuses on the idea to re-construct the meta-narrative in complex spatial orders. While architecture serves as the body of research in which the territorial, spatial networks, economical and political transformations are saturated. The graphic novel acts as a practice of reordering and shifting between things, events, dialogs, accounts, and archival material. Harb graduated from the Department of Architectural Engineering at Birzeit University in Ramallah in 2006. He finished his studies in 2011 with a Master’s degree in arts at Goldsmiths College in London/United Kingdom. Currently Harb is a PhD candidate in Human Georgraphy at University of Manchester.

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Kate Hill

Kate Hill is an artist and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. As a practicing artist she has had solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne and taken part in artist residency programs in Japan and Australia. Her work is concerned with temporal engagements with place, and she utilises site-specific materials such as earth, clay and water to express local contexts through ceramic processes. On a theoretical level, her Masters thesis: Artist in Residence Programs: The Temporal, the Spatial and the Social, allowed her to investigate the philosophical underpinnings of an artists experience of place through a particular program. She is continuing her research in this field with the Centre for Cultural Partnerships at the University of Melbourne.

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John Hill

John Hill is an artist, organiser and educator and was Education Officer at Flat Time House 2009–2015 and a founding member of the London-based collective LuckyPDF. His current practice explores network technologies and contemporary cultural platforms. He is also a Graduate Researcher at Liverpool John Moores University, contributing to the Uses of Art group, a partner of L’Internationale.

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Ana Hoffner

Ana Hoffner is an artist, theorist, performer and mentor based in Vienna. Hoffner understands the artistic field as a place of critical knowledge production, mainly with an interest in Queer Theory and Visual Cultural Studies. Through a performative artistic and theoretical practice as well as video, photography and installation Hoffner’s work questions persistently both production and presentation, research methods as well as the communication of (arts-based) research results. Hoffner has finished the PhD in Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Art Vienna where she is also teaching as Senior Lecturer. Recent Exhibitions include „Vier mal zwölf“ Neuer Kunstverein Wien; „Opening (Stadt)Parcour“ Tanzquartier Wien; „Drowning and Swallowing this Text“ LACE – Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (all 2014); „Was ist Kunst?… Resuming fragmented Histories“ Künstlerhaus Graz, steirischer herbst (2013) and “History Lessons” mumok Kino Wien (2012).

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Brian House

Brian House’s artistic and academic work traverses alternative geographies, experimental music, and a critical approach to data. He is currently a doctoral student at Brown University in the Music and the Modern Culture and Media departments, and his work has been shown by MoMA in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, Ars Electronica, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Eyebeam, among others.

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Anthony Howell

A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, Anthony Howell was an editor of Wallpaper Magazine and founder of The Theatre of Mistakes, which performed at the Paris Biennale, the Theater for the New City and the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. He is editor of Grey Suit: Video for Art and Literature. His solo performances have been seen at the Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. He teaches Tango for Balance—for people with Parkinson’s Disease. His book The Analysis of Performance Art was published by Routledge in 1999. He is also a poet whose first collection, Inside the Castle, was published in 1969. His novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars in 1986. His articles on visual art, dance, performance and poetry have appeared in many publications. He is a contributing editor of the Fortnightly Review.

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Liesbeth Huybrechts

Liesbeth Huybrechts (1979, Leuven, Belgium) is Postdoctoral researcher in the area of participatory design and spatial transformation processes in the research group Arck, University of Hasselt. She is involved in the research project Traders dealing with Participatory Design and Art in Public Space (www.tr-aders.eu). As a freelancer she is active in exhibitions, workshops, writing and in the master program Social Design, Design Academy Eindhoven. In the past, she taught in the Interaction Design Department and co-founded the research group Social Spaces (LUCA, KULeuven) exploring the social qualities of design and art.

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Eva Maria Jernsand

Eva Maria Jernsand, PhD candidate in marketing at the Centre for Tourism, School of Business, Economics and Law, Department of Business Administration, University of Gothenburg. Eva Maria’s research interests include place and destination development, participation and social sustainability. She is involved in the same transdisciplinary project in Kisumu as Helena Kraff.

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Helena Kraff

Helena Kraff, PhD candidate in Design, School of Design and Crafts, Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing arts, University of Gothenburg. Helena’s main research interest is participatory design, and exploring critical aspects and challenges of participation. For the last three years, Helena has been working in a transdisciplinary project in Kisumu, Kenya, where researchers from different fields, public and private organisation as well as residents have taken part.

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Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour (1947-2022) was a philosopher, sociologist of science and anthropologist. Especially known for his work in the field of Science and Technology Studies and for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987). In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he collaborated with researchers in science policy and research management. Latour was Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, after five years (2007-2012) as the Vice-President for Research. While at Sciences Po, he created the médialab to seize the opportunity offered to social theory through the spread of digital methods, and, together with Valérie Pihet, he created a new experimental programme in art and politics.

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Renate Lorenz

Renate Lorenz is an artist and cultural scientist, mostly in the fields of Art and Queer Theory. She is showing her art work internationally (together with Pauline Boudry), e.g. at the 54th Venice Biennial (2011), at the Paris Triennial (2012), at SLG and Tate Modern, London, at the CAPC Bordeaux, Kunstverein Karlsruhe (all 2013), Moma Modern Monday (2014), Kunsthalle Wien and Kunsthalle Zürich (2015). Her most recent English publications are Queer Art (Transcript, 2012) and Not Now! Now! (editor, 2014) as well as the artist books Temporal Drag (Hatje Cantz 2011) and Aftershow (Sternberg, 2014). She is professor for art and research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. www.boudry-lorenz.de

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Marian Macken

Marian Macken is a designer and educator, trained in architecture, landscape architecture and visual art. She is currently Associate Professor of Architecture at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China. Marian’s research examines temporal aspects of spatial practice, and the role of artists’ books as documentation of architecture, with particular interest in the implications and possibilities for architectural drawing and exhibition as design outcome. Her work has been acquired by various international public collections of artists’ books, including collections at Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, UK, and Urawa Art Museum, Japan, and she has undertaken visiting artist residencies in London, Tokyo and Wellington, New Zealand.

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Annie Malcolm

Annie Malcolm does research in China on aesthetic responses to economic change, employing visual methodology, and Chinese language, philosophy and the contemporary art as context. She is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, Malcolm made performances in New York City.

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Sandra Noeth

Biography

Dr. Sandra Noeth is a Professor at the HZT-Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin, and an international curator. She specialises in ethical and political perspectives towards body-practice and theory. In various transdisciplinary projects and collaborations, she engages with bodies under structural violence and the potential of artistic practice and aesthetic experience to raise awareness and build agency for the systemic non/representation of some bodies, see Violence of Inscriptions, with A. Zaides, 2016–18, HAU Hebbel am Ufer; What does it take to cross a border?, IfA gallery Berlin, 2018; Hållning— a body-based platform for collective learning, MDT Stockholm, 2021. Her current research focuses on questions of bodily integrity and the unequal politics of protection and security of bodies, see Bodies, un-protected, 2021–22, with Mousonturm, Frankfurt. She wrote and co-edited several books on the topic such as Breathe. Critical Investigations into the Inequalities of Life (due 2023, edited with J. Janša); Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Movement (2018, with G. Ertem); and Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects: Artistic Articulations of Borders and Collectivity in Lebanon and Palestine (2019). In 2009–14, Sandra acted as the Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanzquartier in Vienna. As an educator, she works regularly with DOCH/Stockholm University of the Arts (where she has been Senior Lecturer since 2012), Ashkal Alwan HWP-program (where she was Resident Professor 2015–16).

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Elise Nuding

Elise Nuding is a dance artist; a mover and a thinker whose creative practice includes performance, choreography, and writing. Her practice-based research explores the relationship between people, places, and things, and seeks to make these ever-shifting interplays present through performance. Based in London and Stockholm, she holds an MA from London Contemporary Dance School and a BA from Brown University. Her work has been presented at locations across the UK, in Providence, R.I. (USA), Stockholm, Lisbon, and Berlin. www.elisenuding.com

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Anna Maria Orru

The foundation of Anna Maria Orru’s work is embedded in biomimicry, natural system design, food and in curating research, providing an innovative approach in the field of sustainable design, art, urbanism and architecture. She works as a connective tissue, working in the interstitial spaces between disciplines by bringing a variety of diverse disciplines and talents to the table to creatively tackle issues around climate change. Her projects, and ongoing phd research at Chalmers, cover the distinct topics of food, architecture, bodily engagement, senses and urbanism, explored through the study of organoleptic qualities and butoh dance in urban foodscapes as a way to explore food systems on both the macro and micro levels. She has been a lecturer and teacher at a number of Swedish Institutes since 2010.

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Nicola Perugini

Nicola Perugini is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University (Middle East Studies, Italian Studies, Cogut Center for the Humanities). He is the author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press, 2015, with Neve Gordon) and is currently working on a book project about the history of human shields. Nicola is a regular contributor to Al Jazeera English, London Review of Books and Counterpunch. Since 2010, he has been collaborating with the art-research collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR).

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Anjalika Sagar

Anjalika Sagar is one of the members of the collaborative platform The Otolith Group along with Kodwo Eshun, which was founded in 2002. The Group sets out to rethink the dynamics of cultural production under conditions of
accelerated, unstable and precarious global environments. This endeavour finds eclectic forms including films, artworks, exhibitions, curated programmes, and publications that are conceived as ongoing research into the structures of global regimes, speculative futures, tricontinentalism, and cybernetics. Their work in particular has focused on audiovisual essays as an expanded form that seek to inhabit events and histories that inform our present and future, geology and collective unconscious.

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Anna Salamon

Anna Salamon (born 1984, Warsaw, PL) is an artist based in London. Working across painting, printmaking, drawing and installation, she creates painterly objects and architectural exhibits which display various degrees of embodiment. Her research investigates mechanisms of translation between matter and the immaterial, and how these notions are constituted within the post-human and new materialist contexts. She was a finalist of Creekside Open, A.P.T, London (2013) and Kettle’s Yard Open, Kettle’s Yard Cambridge (2008) and a recipient of De Segonzac Award (2012) and Landseer Award (2011). She is currently an active member of New Materialisms Reading Group at Banner Repeater, London. Forthcoming projects include Ceasura et Vide Supra, hosted by Lewisham Arthouse, London (2015) and a group show at Turf Projects (2016). Anna Salamon graduated from the Royal Academy Schools, London (2012) and Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (2008), having previously studied Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw, Warsaw.

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Pablo Calderón Salazar

Pablo Calderón Salazar (1985, Bogotá, Colombia) is a designer and researcher living in Brussels. He studied Industrial Design (bachelor level) at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá, Colombia (2008) and Social Design (Master in Design) at the Design Academy Eindhoven (June 2013). He is currently conducting (since March 2014) a PhD in the Arts with the group Social Spaces at LUCA/KULeuven, in the wider context of the project TRADERS (Training Art and Design Researchers for Participation in Public Space). The essence of his practice lies in collaboration with local partners in the different contexts where his projects take place, where he empathically interprets the interests of different constituents, using dialogue as his main tool.

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Selina Schepers

Selina Schepers graduated in 2009 as a Master of Philosophy (mPhil) in Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology at the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands. Currently, she is coordinator of and researcher at research group Social Spaces. She coordinates several design research-related courses at Luca, school of Arts, campus C-mine. Since 2010, she coordinated and participated in various research projects such as ‘Open Garments’ (EU/FP7, www.open-garments.eu), ‘TRADERS’ (EU/FP7, www.tr-aders.eu), ‘MELoDiA’ (IWT/MIX) and ‘TraPIST’ (IWT/ICON).

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Joel Sines

Joel Sines trained as an actor and theatre director at Academia Contemporânea do Espetáculo, in Porto. He has led an intense artistic practice in the realm of theatre, cinema and performance art through research and practice both in Portugal and the UK. He has collaborated with visual artists and directors such as Ângela Ferreira, João Sousa Cardoso, Giorgio Sadotti, Claudio da Silva and Bruno Schiappa. Sines is co-founder of the performance collective Ma Companhia (Bad Company) based in Porto. He recently moved to London, where he was admitted to the Open School East Associates Programme in 2015.

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Trine Friis Sørensen

Trine Friis Sørensen is a curator and an independent researcher. She received her PhD from the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2015 with the practice-based thesis We Can (Not) Work It Out: A Curatorial Inquiry into the Danish Radio Archive. Working as a curator both independently and with institutions for 10 years, she has curated a number of exhibitions, and her research interests include curating, contemporary art and practice-based research.

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Claire Louise Staunton

Claire Louise Staunton was Director/Curator at Flat Time House and at Inheritance Projects (London). In 2015 she took up the position of Research Curator at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, where she leads public programmes and research activities on new town urban planning, communities and art in partnership with the Open University. She is a PhD research candidate in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art.

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Jalal Toufic

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. His books, many of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download as PDF files at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com. He was a participant in the Sharjah Biennials 6, 10 and 11, the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Documenta 13, the 3rd Athens Biennale, and “A History: Art, Architecture, and Design, from the 1980s Until Today” (Centre Pompidou). In 2011, he was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD; and in 2013–2014, he and Anton Vidokle led Ashkal Alwan’s third edition of Home Workspace Program, based in Beirut.

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Jenny Tunedal

A poet and literary critic, Tunedal teaches Literary Composition at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg.

Tunedal has published five collections of poetry: Hejdade, hejdade sken (Wahlström & Widstrand, 2003), Kapitel Ett (Wahlström & Widstrand, 2008), Handflata: Du ska också ha det bra (Eolit förlag, 2009), Mitt krig, sviter (Wahlström & Widstrand, 2011), and Rosor skador (Wahlström & Widstrand, 2017). Her poetry has been translated into Belarusian, Polish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Spanish and German.

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Jana Unmüßig

Jana Unmüßig, based in Berlin, choreographer, doctoral student at UNIARTS Helsinki. Her choreographic work has been presented internationally. For more info: www.jana-unmussig.com

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Victoria Walsh

Professor Victoria Walsh is Head of the Curating Contemporary Art Programme at the Royal College of Art, London. She is currently Director of the RCA’s major research project into ‘Curatorial and Artistic Research’ as part of the EU-funded Museums in an Age of Migrations programme, working with five partner projects including the artists Kader Attia, Camille Henrot, Lawrence Abu-Hamdan, and Leo Asemota and MACBA, Bétonsalon, Stedelijk Museum, and Whitechapel Gallery, She was Director of the Tate / AHRC funded project ‘Cultural Value and the Digital: Practice, Policy and Theory’, Co-investigator of ‘Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture’, and is Co-investigator of ‘the Tate research project ‘Art School Educated: Curriculum Change in UK Art Schools 1960 to present’. She recently led the reconstruction of Richard Hamilton’s 1951 exhibition ‘Growth and Form’ for the Tate / Museo Reina Sofia retrospective and her latest exhibition-display ‘New Brutalist Image 1949-55’ at Tate Britain.

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Andy Weir

Andy Weir is an artist and writer from London. His work investigates the concepts, affects and politics of deep time. Recent work on this includes “Thick-Diachronic Crash” in Realism Materialism Art (2015); “Cosmic Alreadymades” in Journal of Curatorial Studies(2014); and “Instituting Art at the Outermost” at Project Anywhere, New School, New York (2014). He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Arts University Bournemouth, and PhD Researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Frances Williams

I am an artist and PhD research student at Falmouth University, Cornwall. My practice-based research uses performance to investigate the gesture of looking away. My recent research activities have involved collaboration with artist Ros Bason, using the vehicle of Fran’s People –Freeform Interpretation in performances at The Exchange Gallery, Penzance, Cornwall, UK and The Independent School of Art Sessions at the Shipwrights, Falmouth, Cornwall, UK as well as a recent performance presentation on the publication Diagrams for Seriality by Dr Neil Chapman at Copy Press Books, Housmann’s Bookshop in Kings Cross, London.

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Nathan Witt

Nathan Witt is a [British artist] working with text, drawing, installation and performance.
Witt graduated in painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2003 and has been a resident with Delfina Foundation and Art School Palestine, Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut, Decolonizing Architecture in Beit Sahour and Hospitalfield Arts in Arbroath. Witt has recently been nominated for a Paul Hamlyn Award for visual art.
Recent exhibitions include: A Interloper at CCA Gallery, Glasgow (2015); Concerning the Bodyguard, The Tetley, Leeds (2014); A Museum of Immortality curated by Anton Vidokle and Boris Groys, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2014); Proxy Special, Platform Gallery, Belfast (2014); NOA III (Not Only Arabic) Research Week in conjunction with AIR Antwerpen and Kunsthalle Lissabon at 98 Weeks, Beirut, (2013); Points of Departure curated by Rebecca Heald, Al Mahatta Gallery, Ramallah (2013) and The Really Wild Show, London (2012).

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Benedikte Zitouni

Benedikte Zitouni is Lecturer of Sociology at Saint-Louis University, Brussels. She is interested in collective intelligences and has written empirical tales, based on archival work, conveying people’s ingenuity and societal changes at work. Such tales involve urban ecological experiences or communities’ and prisoners’ struggles, but also civil servants’ and technicians’ successes, as well as the tactics involved in peace camps or neighbourhood occupations. In several papers, she tackles the connections between knowledge-making, narratives and empowerment and she has written about situated knowledge, otherworldliness and matters such as remembering and memory-making. Currently she is working on urban agriculture and its connections to forgotten causes and stakes.

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