Seminar 82 // 10, 11, 12, 13 June 2020 // London
Advanced Practices (Curatorial/Knowledge) Seminar, 10 – 12 June 2020
Wednesday 10 June, 11am – 2pm
Practice Lab
Irit Rogoff
Reading:
- Sarah Pierce, "The Community of the Exhibition” (text circulated last week)
Thursday 11 June, 11am – 4.30pm
11am – 12.30pm Morning session
MRes presentation Susanne Ewerlöf
Chair: Adnan Madani
12.30 – 2.30pm Break
2.30 – 4.30pm Afternoon session
Simone Forti – Seeing myself as a vertebrate among others
Filipa Ramos
For the last sixty years, choreographer and artist Simone Forti has been examining the world through movement, which is her method and matter. Movement has allowed Forti to understand how bodies come together and intuitively negotiate positions, weights and functions. Interested in the movement and morphology of other life forms, from bears to onions or seaweed, Forti conducted several nature observation studies, epitomised by the choreographic work Sleepwalkers (1968), in which she re-enacts and performs the behaviour of various creatures. In the early 1970s, Forti coined the term ‘dance state’ to define a form of extreme concentration and pleasure induced by the repetition and variation of movement: a sort of trance, of enchantment, a mode of becoming other. In this seminar, Filipa Ramos will introduce her research on Simone Forti, focusing on Forti’s engagement with nonhuman life and relating her work with two parallel epistemological threads: Vinciane Despret’s concept of Becoming-with and Lorraine Daston’s questioning of the limits of anthropocentrism.
Filipa Ramos is a Lisbon-born writer and lecturer based in London. She is Curator of Art Basel Film. Her research looks at human’s engagement with animals in the contexts of art. Her essays and texts have been published in magazines and books worldwide. With Andrea Lissoni she founded and curates Vdrome, a programme of screenings of artists’ films. She is Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and at the Arts Institute of the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Basel. She was Editor in Chief of art-agenda, Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal and contributed for Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2016) and curated the group exhibition “Animalesque” (Bildmuseet Umeå, Summer 2019, and BALTIC, Gateshead, Winter 2020). She curates the ongoing symposia series The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish with Lucia Pietroiusti for the Serpentine Galleries.
Readings:
- Vinciane Despret, "The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis" in Body & Society (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2004), Vol. 10 (2–3): 111–134.
- Lorraine Daston, "Intelligences: Angelic, Animal, Human" in Thinking with Animals – New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mittman, eds.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 37-58.
Suggested:
- If you aren't familiar with Simone Forti's work, this short video tribute could be a good introduction to her practice: https://vimeo.com/98630544
- Watch the beginning of this long video (or the whole of it if you want, of course), in which Forti performs Sleepwalkers: https://vimeo.com/197227609
Friday 12 June, 11am – 5.30pm
11am – 12.30pm Morning session
MRes presentation Vaida Stepanovaite
Chair: Bridget Crone
12.30 – 3pm Break
3 – 5.30pm Afternoon session
Thinking in action: techniques of relation
Brian Massumi and Erin Manning
The title for this session is drawn from Erin Manning and Brian Massumi's book Thought in the Act (2014), in which they discuss the concepts and techniques developed with Senselab the organisation that Manning founded in 2004. Senselab works through experimentation and transdisciplinary collaboration as means for "inventing techniques of relation" as they write in the book. Thought in the Act sets out a series of propositions for practices of relation, and this will be an opportunity to discus these with Manning and Massumi, as well as their work more generally – for Manning, this centres around dance, movement and the "minor gesture", and Massumi's recent work 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value (2018) as well as his earlier work on the body, affect and affective politics.
Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement. Art exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucharest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke UP, forthcoming), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014).
Brian Massumi is a philosopher and social theorist. He specialises in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy, and his research spans arts, architecture, cultural and political theory and philosophy. His most recent publications include 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value (2018), Politics of Affect (2015), What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014), Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (co-written with Erin Manning; 2014), and Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002). His translations from the French include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. With Erin Manning and the SenseLab he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction.
Readings:
- Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
- Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2014): 84-174.
5.30 – 6pm Break
6pm Drinks
Bring a drink and raise a glass to the end of the academic year and to everyone’s amazing contribution to this 'seminar in difficult conditions’