Seminar 16 // 30 April & 01, 02 May 2009 // London
Seminar 16 // 30 April - 2 May 2009 // London location tba
1. Jean-Paul Martinon session on the categorical imperative
2. Joint session with the Royal College of Art's Curating Contemporary Art program; Guest Speaker: Nataša Ilić, 'What, How & for Whom' (WHW), Zagreb, Croatia
3. Reading Group Further information about the sessions can be found below:
THURSDAY 30 April: location tba
11am-1pm The Categorical Imperative - session with Jean-Paul Martinon The idea for this session is simply to read together a text by Jean-Luc Nancy on what most urgently obliges us to think.
2-4pm Discussion of Lexicon project.
5-7pm cinema Visual Cultures Guest Lecture Series - GARY GENOSKO Félix Guattari's Forgotten Film Theory: For a minor cinema During the mid to late 1970s Guattari sketched a theory of cinema that I want to develop more fully around two axes: the sigificance of the anti-psychiatry movement for political cinema and the theory of the minor. GARY GENOSKO is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada. His most recent book is Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (Pluto, 2009).
FRIDAY 1 May: location tba
11am-1:30pm Guest Speaker: Nataša Ilić 'What, How & for Whom' (WHW) is a non-profit organization for visual culture and curators' collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb, Croatia. Its members are curators Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović. Since May 2003 WHW has been directing the program of Gallery Nova - non profit, city owned gallery in Zagreb. What, how and for whom are the three basic questions of every economic organization that also concern the planning, concept and realization of exhibitions, as well as the production and distribution of artworks or artists' position at the labor market. These questions, which were the title of WHW's first project dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, in 2000 in Zagreb, became the motto of WHW's work and the title of the collective. Instrumentality of social capital in constituting the social post socialist reality turned out to be a matrix for the development of WHW's projects and their internal and external operations. All WHW projects have been conceived as a platform for discussing relevant social issues through art, theory and media, as well as a model of collaboration and exchange of know-how between cultural organizations of different backgrounds. Besides exhibitions, WHW projects encompass lectures and public discussions conducted by international artists, curators and cultural theoreticians, publications and a book edition on contemporary cultural practice and cultural theory, radio broadcasts and interventions, screenings and live acts.
2:30-6pm location tba Presentations by Royal College of Art students Polly Savage and Ines Costa Dias Polly Savage (MPhil): An Analysis of the Impact of Marxist Government and Petro-Diamond Patronage on Art Frameworks in Angola from 1975 to the Present Ines Costa Dias (MPhil): The Lusophone Contemporary Arts – A Postcolonial Perspective
7-10pm location tba Drinks and dinner
SATURDAY 2 May: location tba
Student Reading Group led by Ines Moreira Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please? Bruno Latour ABSTRACT : Technology is epistemology’s poor relative. It still carries the baggage of a definition of matter handed down to it by another odd definition of scientific activity. The consequence is that many descriptions of “things” have nothing “thingly” about them. They are simply “objects” mistaken for things. Hence the necessity of a new descriptive style that circumvents the limits of the materialist (in effect idealist) definition of material existence. This is what has been achieved in the group of essays on “Thick Things” for which this note serves as an afterward.
