Forum
FORUM
The Limits of Exclusion. Between Aesthetics and Ethics
Since 2010 Malta has been accompanied by the Forum, a two-day conference which, in a sectional and interdisciplinary way, reviews the Idiom theme and builds an intellectual context for the artistic projects presented during the festival. The Forum is addressed to anyone who wishes to confront their festival-related impressions and emotions with issues that are relevant to the contemporary humanities. The lecturers include philosophers, writers, sociologists and artists. We greatly wish to invite the festival audience to contribute to the discussion. The name ‘Forum’ emphasises the open form of the meeting in its attempt to move beyond the structure of a conference that is lectured to listeners ex cathedra.
In 2010 the Forum title was Politics of Imagination. It was dedicated to the aesthetical and sociopolitical dimension of Flemish theatre. Our goal was to bring together the Polish and Flemish theatre reality. In 2011 the Forum will consider the multidimensionality and ambiguity of the state of exclusion understood as a boundary phenomenon that universally defines the condition of contemporary people. In the discussions we would like to contravene the common sociopolitical understanding of the term, as well as to reflect on its inconclusiveness and the paradoxes of expressing the condition through art.
The Forum will be crowned by the publication of a review of the festival Idiom, a collection of writings that, apart from their archival value, will provide a topically significant commentary to the Festival programme line that will stimulate discussion about the subsequent Idioms.
Dorota Semenowicz, Katarzyna Tórz
FORUM PROGRAMME
The Forum will be held in Polish, English and French. The organisers will provide translation. Free admission.
venue: Galeria Miejska Arsenał
8 July 2011
Leading speaker: Paweł Mościcki
10.30 a.m. opening
10.45 a.m. - 1.00 p.m. THE LIMITS OF SUBJECTIVITY
Who governs subjectivity? What is the basis for determining the subjects who are totally excluded and deprived of their fundamental rights? Why does stating that we treat people like animals and animals like people sound so ambiguous? Who decides who is and who is not excluded, and how is such a decision justified?
Participants:
Szymon Wróbel Nietzsche's Three Hypotheses on the Origins of the Chorus in Tragedy
Anat Pick Animals: Between Kinship and Exclusion
Monika Bakke The aesthetics of concern: nonhumans in the art
1.00 p.m. – 2.30 p.m. lunch break
2.30 p.m. – 2.45 p.m. a slideshow of Maciej Pisuk’s works
2.45 p.m. – 4.30 p.m. THE NARRATIONS OF EXCLUSION
Is exclusion simply a state of incapacity, apathy and passivity? How does the image of exclusion that is generated by those who watch and judge relate to its perception by the actual excluded? Where are the boundaries of communication? Finally, can we still say, in a globalised world of increasingly alienated societies, that the excluded are a minority and can we ignore the significance and potential of this condition?
Participants:
Maciej Pisuk Warsaw’s Favelas: Old Praga. Photo-documentaries and Exploitation by the Media
Rafał Drozdowski (Exclusive?) Strategies of Counteracting Exclusion vs the (Subjectifying?) Right to Self-exclusion
Tomasz Kireńczuk Excluded Narratives: the Struggle for Subjectivity in Theatre
9 July 2011
Leading speaker: Paweł Mościcki
11.00 a.m. - 1.00 p.m. THE ENGINEERING OF THE IMAGE
Images, visual and linguistic ones, are always created in a specific context which can be subject to ideological (and consequently political and legal) manipulation. How do images create our (racial, class, sexual and national) identities? How do they influence the way we segregate into the perpetrators and the victims, the legal and the illegal, the excluded and the “normalised”? What role do the contemporary media play in this process?
Participants:
W. T. Mitchell The Uncanny: Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror
Andrzej Leder Immobilisation. Facing Images of Exclusion
1.00 p.m. - 2.30 p.m. lunch break
2.30 p.m. - 5.00 p.m. SELF-EXCLUSION AS A CREATIVE GESTURE
How do artists stage their own biographies? Is ‘exclusion as a creative gesture’ an oxymoron? The topic of this panel will include artistic provocations, masquerades and poses resulting from artists’ social entanglement – their opposing of conventions and social rituals, and their concurrent use of this opposition in their public self-creation. What is the link between an idea and its manifestation in media? Where is the boundary between authenticity and posing? Can exclusion be used to seduce?
Participants:
Marek Kędzierski Thomas Bernhard: Alienation as Calculation
Valerie Gerard Self-exclusion: Paradoxes, Aporias, Paroxysms
Cristina Vinuesa Muñoz Jean-Luc Lagarce: Excluded or not?
Małgorzata Dziewulska The Kitsch of Self-presentation: Disability as an Attraction in the Spectacle of Correctness
Acknowledgements: Galeria Miejska Arsenał