News | Meet the new NICA Board

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We are pleased to introduce you the new members of the NICA advisory board. Please find the local representative of your research institute below.

Much looking forward to our collaboration!
Pepita, Tessa and Kim

Board members:

  • Isabel Awad, associate professor of Media and Communication (Erasmus University)
  • Maaike Bleeker, professor of Theatre Studies (Utrecht University)
  • Joost de Bloois, assistant professor of Cultural Analysis and Comparative Literature (University of Amsterdam)
  • Erin La Cour, assistant professor of English Literature and Visual Culture (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
  • Hanneke Grootenboer, professor of Art History (Radboud University)
  • Yasco Horsman, assistant professor of Film and Literary Studies  (Leiden University)
  • Esther Peeren, professor of Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam)
  • Kathryn Roberts, assistant professor of American Studies (University of Groningen)
  • Inge van de Ven, assistant professor of Online Culture (Tilburg University)
  • Ruby de Vos, PhD-Candidate in Literary Criticism and Cultural Analysis (University of Groningen)

News | A brief interview with NICA’s director, Pepita Hesselberth

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Summer School: The Posthuman and New Materialism

As of the 1st of January 2021, the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) is relocated to Leiden University. NICA is the Dutch national research school dedicated to the academic study of contemporary culture from an interdisciplinary, theoretical and critical perspective. The school offers education for research master students and PhD-candidates, and it functions as a professional network of affiliated scholars in all stages of their careers. The new executive team of NICA consists of Pepita Hesselberth (director), Tessa de Zeeuw (manager) and Kim Sommer (office manager). Please find a short interview with the new director below.

An intellectual home

I I have always considered NICA to be my intellectual home in the Netherlands, even well before I became its director. What interests me about the school is that it brings together researchers from many different disciplines and research areas that are often already quite interdisciplinary to begin with (critical theory, continental philosophy, literature, art, media, gender and critical race theory, just to name a few). When I talk about an intellectual home, I am also referring to an ambition: I would like NICA to offer a safe environment for researchers in all phases in their career (from ResMA- and PhD-students to professors), offering them a space to try out new ideas, to set an agenda, and to be able to critically examine contemporary culture in all its complexity. Safe, here, does not necessarily mean uncritical or unanimous. Quite to the contrary: it means to enter into a dialogue, to be challenged, to exchange ideas, to face the complexity of things, to challenge and stimulate each other’s thinking, so that we can learn to understand and analyze our contemporary culture better.

What are NICA’s ambitions (now that it has moved to Leiden)?

In the first place, we wish to continue the marvelous work that is already being done at NICA: to offer (core) courses for ResMA students, to help facilitate conferences, seminars and masterclasses organized for and by our PhDs and colleagues in the field, and to enable our research and researchers to gain visibility and momentum in a national context. One the goals we have set ourselves for the future is to work towards a better distribution of the ResMA and PhD-education across the country, to look into the possibilities for collaborations between affiliated faculties in this regard, so that we can do our name as a national research school, with Leiden as the central hub for the next five years, justice.

What’s in it for the ResMa- and PhD-students, what’s in it for affiliated staff?

Especially for young researchers and PhD’s, it is extremely important to be able to present their work in progress, to be able to engage in a discussion about their work, to develop the necessary skills to do the same within an international environment, and above all, to build a network on which they can call in the future. Another clear focus in the coming years, therefore, will be to revitalize the ResMA and PhD councils, to set up a PhD mentorship, and—in addition to broadening the scope and reach of our ResMA education—to facilitate more targeted education and events for PhDs.

National? How about international?

That’s right. We naturally hope that that the diverse range of events, activities and opportunities that NICA offers thus far gains the international visibility it deserves. But indeed, one of our aims is to look into the possibilities for embedding NICA more firmly in the international consortia of which it takes part. International collaborations are on the agenda!

Anything else?

What I really enjoy about NICA is its bottom-up working: it’s on account of the engagement and initiatives of our academic community that we can offer such a wonderful and diverse program at NICA. What makes NICA research stand out, is that it is often a little ‘quirky’; it is research with a high-risk high-gain character; it is contemporary, which means that it always runs the risk of being overhauled by time. Nica brings together research on topics  that are important to us because they touch on the social, economic, political and societal heart of our existence, but also: into matters that move us, that make us think. It is our hope and aim to continue to facilitate such research and thinking in the years to come, to find new and strengthening existing partnerships at local, national and international level. And I know that I also speak on behalf of Tessa and Kim when I say: we are looking forward to it! Do not hesitate to reach out and get in touch!

Banner: Dubbelportret – John Hesselberth

Call for Paper | Soapbox Journal: Impasse

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Soabox Call for Papers: Impasse

Call for Papers: 3.0 ‘Impasse’
Contribute to the third volume of our research journal

For the next volume of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis, we invite young researchers and established scholars alike to submit work that critically engages with the theme of impasse.

[Border]

In its first instance, and most literal meaning, an impasse indicates a border that arises in our way. In everyday life, it is what prevents one from moving forward, for instance from entering onto a property one is not allowed to be in or arriving at a dead end. Supposedly, the only possible counter-action, the exit from an impasse, is either the risk of trespassing, of having to turn around, or ending one’s journey. Trespassing borders presents a risk if not an impossibility. It is important not to understate the factuality of the latter. The finiteness inherent to all forms of life constitutes an impasse, and is experienced and managed as such on all manners of scale. Dwelling on the term impasse provides space for speaking of the unresolvable, of the disorienting (what is outside of time and space, alter/outer), of the failure of connection, and finally, of loss, of the unretrievable and the necrotic. The notion of impasse comes to mind all the more in the context of the ongoing pandemic and of transmission through physical contact or proximity.

[Disorientation]

For Derrida, the impasse is synonymous with the notion of aporia; describing a state of unknowing or a contradiction that is seemingly impossible to solve. As Derrida states, “the nonpassage, the impasse or aporia, stems from the fact that there is no limit. There is not yet or there is no longer a border to cross, no opposition between two sides: the limit is too porous, permeable, and indeterminate” (20). By destroying the possibility of passage altogether, an absolute impasse dissolves the antagonism that allowed it to be in the first place. This is how the impasse shifts from the finite to something more “permeable”, which can be trespassed, implying some malleability and flux.

[Liminal space]

An impasse also denotes a specific kind of liminal spatiality. It is a space of the in-between; where one gets stuck or does not know how to proceed. As a state of unknowing, the impasse is constantly being re-configured. How can we orientate ourselves in a space that is always becoming?

Impasses force us to attune to what the Situationists called the ‘psychogeographical’. The city is a space full of impasses and rife with calculation (de Certeau). To be in situ–to drift in one’s movement through space–implies a kind of liquidity that looks to resist: finding fissures and exits, rerouting continuously. Being at an impasse can  allow for stillness, like sitting in a waiting room, allowing for a moment of contemplation, rest or regeneration. Yet in other ways, it is a source of  uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt, as well as a questioning of the relation between the active and the passive–of choices we make or of choices that are made for us. Impasses, as sites of defeat or potentiality, can wield immense affective force.

[Temporality]

At the present time, we find ourselves shifting our sights from impasse to future–the figuration of an after. What does it mean to overcome an impasse? Does it necessarily imply a radical change? Is it a rupture of the status quo in order to move towards a total reconfiguration? The current situation presses these questions onto us.

[Crisis]

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes “the historical present- as an impasse, a thick moment of ongoingness, a situation that can absorb many genres without having one itself- is a middle without boundaries, edges, a shape” (200). If we would try to give the ‘historical present’ a genre, it might be that of crisis. We have been held in a perpetual state of alertness, which at the same time pledges us to inaction. As Agamben describes in State of Exception, the mode of inaction is the condition for a politics of emergency. The inherent finiteness of crisis is prolonged into a permanent temporariness. We seem to be stuck in a crisis that has no shape and thus no limit. In this limbo we come to expect the unusual, the surprising, maybe even the unthinkable. This passivity and uncertainty can also give way to moments of resilience when we begin to understand an impasse as a disruption that holds a potential for change.

[Healing]

The author Milan Kundera states that “an impasse is the place of […] most beautiful inspirations” (“une impasse est le lieu de mes plus belles inspirations” 23). The impasse, then, is perhaps not always a negative dead-end or stalemate, but can also provide a space for  hope and new possibilities. A standstill may allow for a moment of rest and recovery, which is needed for overcoming obstacles, bridging gaps or tending to open wounds. The impasse also holds the potential for care, emphasising a relationality between bodies, the human and the non-human, and attempts to reach some kind of agreement or compromise. When the way we care shifts, and how we relate to our distant and intimate surroundings changes (as the coronavirus pandemic has shown), the impasse forces a reevaluation of interconnectedness and relationality.

We encourage submissions in the direction of, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • States of the in-between, the liminal, the uncertain
  • The concept of care (also in relation to a shared experience of the impasse)
  • Caring over distance and how it alters perception of space
  • Practices of mourning, healing, renewal
  • The impasse as crisis (climate crisis, health crisis)
  • Representation of the impasse in literature, film, visual art, etc.
  • Politics of power in the impasse, and the active and the passive
  • Border studies (limits, figurative borders)
  • (Post)colonial studies
  • Futurity
  • Trespassing, exceptions
  • Hope, possibility
  • Periods and states of contemplation and (mis)understanding
  • (The pausing of) conflict
  • Reaching compromise/agreement
  • Stretching out of time (the immediate and the gradual)

Please submit your proposal (800-1000 words) or already written paper following the MLA formatting and referencing style (maximum 5000 words) to submissions@soapboxjournal.com by January 10th 2021. If you hand in a proposal or outline, please consider that the first draft of the full papers (3000-5000 words) are due February 17th. If you have any questions regarding your submission, do not hesitate to contact us.

We also accept submissions for our website all year round. We encourage a variety of styles and formats, including short-form essays (around 2000 words), reviews, experimental writing and multimedia. Please get in touch to pitch new ideas or existing projects that you would like to have published on our website. Contact us on web@soapboxjournal.com for any web related questions and submissions.

Works Cited

  • Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford University Press, 1993.
  • Kundera, Milan. Risibles Amours. Translated by Francois Kérel, Gallimard, 1986.

Photo Credit: Jordi de Vetten

Film in Context Series

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Film in Context Series

Film in Context Series

Organized by Karen Sztajnberg (ASCA)

January 18, February 15,March 15, April 12, May 1, 2021

This is a guest speaker series about film and television as dynamically evolving media. We will attempt to offer researchers an in-depth look at different facets of the creative craft, the distribution and exhibition aspects always establishing connections between the guest and topic to our emphasis on cultural analysis.

As the ways in which we consume and think of audio-visual media evolves, we will bring our critical lens towards a vaster debate on the transformations under way.

Goals

  1. To give ASCA and NICA researchers deeper insight into the makers/artist perspective and to provide an opportunity for dialog outside of theoretical thinking.
  2. To form a sense of community during this challenging COVID19 year. It will take creative solutions to help the new cohort coalesce into a peer group. This is just one palpable attempt to foster a small sense of belonging to a group, where we can grow from hearing each other’s contribution in the form of questions and comments on the guest’s work.

Specifications

This is a monthly series happening on zoom, where a guest is paired with a topic that gives them a starting point from which we can launch our own meditations on the subject at hand. Such sessions will be filmed and made available for other UvA participants.

ASCA researchers get to actively interact with guests. Less of a lecture, more of a conversation.

Attendants will be expected to watch a film or two, or do some moderate reading ahead of time and to prepare questions. This way we can make these conversations beneficial to our research and promote an expansion of our understanding of the medium as it transforms.

Topics and Guests

  • The Future of Curating and Programming ( Jan 18th, 5pm AMS time)

Richard Peña (Rome Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center). In a context where algorithms are increasingly in charge of tipping what we watch, and where hyper access to information is carried in every pocket, how will the role of the film curator evolve and what demands will arise? The question of whether auteur film should be seen as part of a continuum or on its own terms will also be explored in this session, broaching filmmaker curator loyalties, forming and unsettling audiences.

RSVP Here

  • Cultivating a Cinematographer’s Signature or Making Visuals Subaltern to Storytelling? (February 15th, 5pm AMS time)

Andrij Parekh (Succession, Brave New World, Blue Valentine) will discuss the value of attending to the director’s vision versus creating a personal style that will carry out throughout their oeuvre. With the “vulgarization” of the photographic image via phone-cameras, and IG filters, what does a visual style even mean?

RSVP Here

  • Decolonizing Screens (March 15th, 5pm AMS time)

Carlos Gutierrez (Cinema Tropical), runs the biggest organization responsible for distributing, publicizing and measuring the impact of Latin American films in the USA. This conversation will breach the challenges and unique offerings of transnational circuits, the future of foreign film distribution and what gets lost and gained in translation.

RSVP Here

  • Heterofatalism in Popular Media (April 16th, 4pm AMS time)

A well documented crisis of heterosexuality is palpable in scholarly publications like The Tragedy of Heterosexuality and Tomorrow Sex will be Good Again, but also in popular media productions like Promising Young Woman and the series I May Destroy You. Having coined the term Heterofatalism, Indiana Seresin will discuss the many unfoldings of deflated straight women and abject feminism playing out in our private and theatrical screens.
Reading and screening assignments posted in RSVP page.

RSVP Here

  • Repurposing Porn (May 14th, 4pm AMS time)

Pornoterrorism, Porntrepeneurism and Pandemic-porn. Online platforms have enabled a myriad of variations on an old mediatic trope: pornography. A case study of Maria Basura’s performance art, which intersects decolonial and porn-terrorist practices, will be our starting point into the everlasting draw of prurience in odd places.

RSVP Here

 Guest Speaker Bios

 Richard Peña
Richard Peña is a Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema. From 1988 to 2012, he was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival. At the Film Society, Richard Peña organized retrospectives of many film artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami,  King Hu, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Fei Mu, Jean Eustache, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura, Nagisa Oshima and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Israeli, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Arab, Korean, Swedish, Turkish, German, Taiwanese and Argentine cinema. Together with Unifrance, he created in 1995 “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema,” the leading American showcase for new French cinema. A frequent lecturer on film internationally, in 2014-2015, he was a Visiting Professor in Brazilian Studies at Princeton, and in 2015-2016 a Visiting Professor in Film Studies at Harvard. In May, 2016, he was the recipient of the “Cathedra Bergman” at the UNAM in Mexico City, where he offered a three-part lecture series “On the Margins of American Cinema,” and December, 2017, gave a course in “International Cinema After 1990” at Beijing University. He also currently hosts WNET/Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.

Carlos Gutierrez
Carlos A. Gutiérrez is co-founder and executive director of Cinema Tropical, the New York-based media arts non-profit organization that has become the leading presenter of Latin American cinema in the U.S. As a guest curator, he has presented several film/video series at different cultural institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, Film at Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Museum, BAMcinématek, and Anthology Film Archives. In 2007, he co-curated the 53rd edition of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and serves as co-director of the Tucson Cine Mexico film festival. He is a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine, a member of Film Forum’s Board of Directors, and has served as a member of the jury for various film festivals including Morelia, SANFIC, Seattle, Margaret Mead, DocsMX, and Austin’s Cine Las Americas. He has served as both expert nominator and panelist for the Rockefeller Fellowship Program for Mexican Film & Media Arts, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Tribeca Film Institute’s Latin America Media Arts Fund, and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

Andrij Parekh
Emmy-nominated Andrij Parekh is of Ukrainian and Indian descent, and was born in Boston, MA in 1971. He studied Media Studies and Sociology at Carleton College (BA 1995- Northfield MN), and cinematography at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (MFA in 2001), and at FAMU (Prague, 1998).  His interest in filmmaking was launched by his travels around the world with a Nikon 35mm and a Super-8mm camera during a hiatus from college in 1992. Over his twenty-year career as a cinematographer, He has shot over twenty features, including Half Nelson‚ (Director Ryan Fleck), Cold Souls‚ (Sophie Barthes), Blue Valentine‚ (Derek Cianfrance), Madame Bovary‚ (Sophie Barthes), and the HBO miniseries Show Me A Hero. Recent work includes, The Zookeeper’s Wife‚ (Niki Caro), the television pilots‚ Thirteen Reasons Why (Netflix) & Succession‚ (Adam McKay for HBO) and the Watchmen‚ pilot for HBO. As he has transitioned into directing, Andrij has directed three episodes of HBO’s Succession (S1 Ep6, S2 Ep2&3), HBO’s Watchmen (S1 Ep4) and two episodes of NBC Peacock’s Brave New World, based on the Aldous Huxley novel.  He is nominated for his directorial work on Succession for the 2020 Emmy Awards.

Indiana Seresin
Indiana Seresin is a writer and PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, and genre theory. They are currently working on a book about sexuality and popular culture, as well as a public education project about the AIDS crisis. They live in Philadelphia.

Ines Ouedraogo
Inès Ouedraogo teaches Latin American & Caribbean literature at Suffolk University and a seminar on Love and Eroticism at Emerson College and holds a PhD in Hispanic Cultures and Literatures as well as two graduate certificates in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies from Boston University. Her dissertation Devouring the Patriarchy: Anthropornophagy and Pleasure Politics in Brazilian Pop Porn Festival is a close reading of a film selection that disrupts hegemonic patriarchal discourses by “cannibalizing” oppressive norms and creating new sexual possibilities.

NICA is Moving! 

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NICA is Moving!

NICA is Moving! 

As of January 1st 2021, the managerial seat of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis, presently based at the University of Amsterdam, will move to Leiden University. The new email address is: nica@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Let us briefly introduce the new executive team:

Director: Pepita Hesselberth is DFF Laureate and assistant professor Film and Digital Media at the Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University. She is the author of Cinematic Chonotopes (Bloomsbury 2014), and co-editor of, amongst others, Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury 2016), Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines (Brill 2018), and Politics of Withdrawal (Rowman and Littlefield 2020). She is currently finalizing her project on Disconnectivity in the Digital Age, for which she received a fellowship from the Danish Council for Independent Research, and was appointed as a research fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen (2016-2018).

Manager: Tessa de Zeeuw is assistant professor Film and Literary Studies at the Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University. She just finalized her PhD on the the law’s fundamental theatricality, the idea that justice must be seen to be done. Tessa is looking forward to start her position after her maternity leave ends in April 2021.

Office Manager: Kim Sommer is finalizing her studies Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University and will start her Research Master in September. She has been active as a board member at a local association of the intercultural European Student’s Forum AEGEE, which has prepared her for the administrative and managerial tasks within organizations on a bigger scale.

We would like to take this opportunity, also, to thank our wonderfull colleagues in Amsterdam for their initiative, ambition and hard work over the last ten years. We look forward to continuing their efforts. During our term, NICA will of course continue to organize and facilitate graduate courses, seminars, lectures, masterclasses and conferences, and, above all, to serve as a community and network for its affiliated scholars. Moreover, we will also gladly work on extending the PhD-Council, which is one of our aims for the years to come.

See you soon and do not hesitate to reach out!

Pepita, Tessa & Kim

Politics and Performance Speakers Series

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Politics and Performance Speakers Series

Organized by Sruti Bala (Theatre Studies) and Elize Mazadiego (Art History)

Registration: e.m.mazadiego@uva.nl

Drawing on our MA module Art and Activism, we are organizing a 4-part speaker series on
the intersection of politics and performance. We invite several international scholars to
present their recent work on histories and contemporary modes of artistic activism. Each
month, starting in February, a webinar will allow for critical reflection and conversation on
social movements, political activism, performance philosophy and embodied practices.

This 5-part online speaker series runs complementary to our jointly taught MA module Art and Activism. The series visits the intersections of politics and performance and hopes for in-depth critical reflection and conversation on social movements, political activism, performance philosophy and embodied practices. We invite several international scholars to present their recent work on histories and contemporary modes of artistic activism.

Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American art

Thursday 25 February 2021, 16:00-18:00 CET
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra (Birkbeck University of London, UK)

What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In her lecture, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy.

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American Art and Intellectual History, looking at the politics of aesthetics and changing ideas of “life”, “agency” and “the body” in artistic practice. Her books include Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art (Rutgers University Press, 2019), the forthcoming essay collection Marcos Kurtycz: Corporeality Unbound (Fauna-Jumex, 2019), and the edited volume Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America.

Theatre amongst the ruins: The poetics and politics of South African adaptations

Thursday 25 March 2021, 16:00-18:00 CET
Mark Fleishman (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Through the conceptual metaphor of the ruin, the lecture explores the ways in which the classical archive has been mobilized and reinvented by two white theatre-makers in South Africa: Athol Fugard’s production of Orestes in 1971 and my own adaptation of Antigone (not quite/quiet) in 2019.

Mark Fleishman is Professor of Theatre in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is also a co-artistic director of Magnet Theatre, an independent theatre company established in 1987. Recent publications: Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows in the Studies in International Performance series at Palgrave (2015) and two special issues of the South African Theatre Journal on Translation & Performance (2019 & 2020). He is currently principal investigator on the project Re-imagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War

Thursday 22 April 2021, 16:00-18:00 CET
Jennifer S. Ponce de León (University of Pennsylvania, US)

The lecture will examine the roles that art can play in the collective labor of creating and defending another social reality. Focusing on artists and art collectives in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States, Ponce de León will address how experimental practices in the visual, literary, and performing arts have been influenced by and articulated with leftist movements and popular uprisings that have repudiated neoliberal capitalism and its violence.

Jennifer S. Ponce de León is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on cultural production and antisystemic movements in the Americas since the 1960s. She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania where she is also faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies. She is also Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and an independent curator. Her book Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2020) theorizes aesthetics as an integral component of contemporary social struggles. Her writing has also appeared in American Quarterly, Philosophy Today, ASAP/Journal, Social Text, e-misférica, GLQ, and in multiple edited collections.

Performance Philosophy and Animals: Towards a Radical Equality

Thursday 27 May 2021, 16:00-18:00 CET
Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (Amsterdam University of the Arts, NL)

Can art allow humans to occupy the worlds of non-human animals? How can performance contribute to addressing anthropocentrism, speciesism and the violence toward animal bodies such perspectives enable? Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca will address the importance and challenges of including animals in how we think about the relation between politics and performance according to an intersectional approach that considers how animal oppression connects with other forms of structural violence and inequality.

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca is Lector, Head of DAS Graduate School and Head of Research at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts in the Netherlands. Her current research project is the AHRC-funded Leadership Fellowship, Performance Philosophy & Animals: Towards a Radical Equality (2019-2022). Her recent books include: The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy (Routledge, 2020) and Encounters in Performance Philosophy (Palgrave, 2014), both co-edited with Alice Lagaay. She is a founding core convener of the international research network, Performance Philosophy, joint series editor of the Performance Philosophy book series with Rowman & Littlefield, and an editor of the open access Performance Philosophy journal. Laura originally trained as an artist at the Slade School of Art in London and presented performances internationally including Tanzquartier Wien (2015); ICA London (2008); Serpentine Gallery, London (2008, with the artists’ collective, SpRoUt); and TATE Britain (2003).

The politics of production in the performing arts

Thursday 24 June 2021, 16:00-18:00 CET
Ana Vujanović (Independent scholar and cultural worker, Berlin/Belgrade)

The lecture argues that performance today is a model of production, rather than a model of politics, as it has been assumed in democratic society. This, however, does not mean that the performance is apolitical or politically irrelevant, but that its politicality is now usually indirect and tacit, predominantly operating in the register of the ‘political unconscious’. Reasons for that indirect and dubious politicality of the performing arts should be found in a wider socio-economic process of today’s neoliberal society. The point is that therein, politics has already been immersed in capitalist production, which is post-Fordist and post-industrial. That phenomenon has multifold causes and consequences. In order to disentangle it, I unfold the twin processes of the economisation of politics and the politicisation of production, as a backdrop against which one should approach the issue of the political dimension of art today.

Ana Vujanović holds a Ph.D. in Humanities (Theatre Studies). She has lectured at various universities and was a professor in the Performance Studies Department at the University Hamburg. Since 2016 she is a team member and mentor at SNDO – School for New Dance Development, AHK Amsterdam. She was a founding member of the TkH [Walking Theory], a Belgrade-based collective, and editor-in-chief of the TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory (2001-17). She has published a number of articles and several books, such as Public Sphere by Performance, with B. Cvejic (2012), A Live Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary Europe, edited with L. Piazza (2019) and Toward a Transindividual Self, with B. Cvejic (2021). She also works as a dramaturg in contemporary theatre, dance, performance and film. With filmmaker Marta Popivoda she is engaged in long-term artistic-theoretical research, which most recently resulted in a documentary Landscapes of Resistance (2021).

Photo Credit: Errorista Landing, Operación B.A.N.G. Peoples Summit. Mar del Plata, Argentina. 2005. Internacional Errorista Photo: Archivo Etcétera.

PhD | (Un)screened Narratives: Non-Normative Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Iran

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New PhD Candidate: Shekoufeh Behbehani,(Un)screened Narratives: Non-Normative Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Iran

PhD-Candidate: Shekoufeh Behbehani | University of Amsterdam | (Un)screened Narratives: Non-Normative Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Iran

The legalization of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in the 1980s in Iran has created an ambivalent space within Iranian gender politics. Although politico-religious discourses on SRS recognize transsexuality without necessitating medical transitioning, they have created a system that perpetuates heteronormativity and gender binarism. Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of Iranian films and theatrical performances have engaged issues of gender and sexuality, highlighting the broader deployment of violence that organizes Iranian gender politics. In doing so, they have joined activists in Iran in producing a counter-discourse to the reigning politico-religious paradigm. Through an interdisciplinary lens, my project studies a recent corpus of films and performances that reveal the ambivalences within Iranian gender politics in relation to the regime of violence in the country. In light of these representations, I explore the extent to which Iran’s particular mapping of gender and sexuality both facilitates and constrains non-normativity and queerness.

Imagining the Image 2020-2021

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Imagining the Image 2020-2021

VU University
Organiser: dr. S. Lutticken
Period: The course has been scheduled on Tuesdays from 13:30 17:15. We will have sessions approximately every two weeks from the first week of February to the last week of May. 

Course Objective

Participants in this course will:

  1. analyse and compare relevant theories of the image in art history, media studies, design studies and the history of architecture.
  2. actively apply theories to selected case studies.
  3. examine the historicity of theories of the image and the potential contemporary relevance of older writings.
  4. reflect on the wider social and cultural relevance of various conceptualizations of the image and visibility.
Course Content

This course examines different conceptualizations of the image in the context of historical transformations of the arts. If, from visual studies to Bildwissenschaft, images and the visual have received a significant amount of scholarly and theoretical attention, the use and reflection on the notion of form seems to have migrated from disciplines such as art history and architectural history largely to fields such as (cultural) history, philosophy and literary studies.

In modern art and theory, form became a master signifier that to some extent displaced the image, understood as representation. Form is the image become autonomous. However, even if the notion of form was key to formalist approaches that prized the autonomy of art, form always threatened (or promise) to flow over into life; the romantic notion of the Lebensform (life form or form of life) has recently staged a return in Giorgio Agamben’s work (but not just there), and Judith Butler theorize social forms, such as that of the assembly; an approach taken up by artists such as Jonas Staal.

But are the crucial forms that shape social reality really visible? Marx’s value-form was anything but directly perceptible, and in our 21st-century Capitalocene, the world is being pre-formed in ways that once again cast doubt on our ability to imagine and to image this world.

More information

Registration:

NL: https://www.vu.nl/nl/opleidingen/bijvakken-voor-studenten/index.aspx

EN: https://www.vu.nl/en/programmes/short/secondary/index.aspx

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NOTE: This is not a NICA core activity but an elective announced on this site solely for  your information. You should register for this course through the university that offers it, and the credits you will earn will also be given out by that university. If your program includes a requirement to earn credits from a national research school, the credits for this elective do not count towards that requirement. You may need to acquire the permission of your programme coordinator and/or board of examinations in order to participate and earn credits for this elective.

PhD | An Exploratory Study on Theatre Interventions with Refugees in the Netherlands

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New PhD: Sanaz Afshin, An Exploratory Study on Theatre Interventions with Refugees in the Netherlands

PhD-Candidate: Sanaz Afshin | An Exploratory Study on Theatre Interventions with Refugees in the Netherlands

This research project revolves around the use of theatre as a tool for supporting the process of integration of refugees. Doing an in-depth examination of applied theatre projects made with/by/about refugees, the main goal of the research is to explore to what extent these projects have been effective in terms of facilitating refugees’ integration. By focusing on four case studies that took place in the Netherlands, this research will address issues around the evaluation strategies, aesthetics, challenges, and ethics of these projects in order to provide a better understanding of applied theatre interventions with refugees. An important attempt of the research will be to integrate the voices of refugees themselves within this debate by listening to their reflections about their participation in such projects.

“We are all in this together” – Connectivity and Community in Isolation

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“We are all in this together” – Connectivity and Community in Isolation

ASCA Workshop 2021, 23-25 June 2021, (Wed to Fri).
Organizers: Jori Snels and Lok Yee Wong

Keynote speakers

  • Prof. dr. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
  • Dr. Alexandra Segerberg, Uppsala University
  • Prof. dr. Iris van der Tuin, Utrecht University
  • Prof. dr. Sally Wyatt, Maastricht University

As our global crisis continues, it seems that the social order and our sense of self is changing. We celebrate family birthdays via Skype, demonstrate for social justice on Instagram, and visit art exhibitions in Animal Crossing; meanwhile, we are condemned to living twenty-four hours a day with our partners, roommates or alone, in a home turned office, habituated to uncertainty and fear. Through this experience, we have become keenly aware of both digital technologies’ previously untapped potentialities for connecting us and their seemingly unbridgeable boundaries; we are learning to live in and with entrapment, experiencing both unprecedented distance and closeness.

How can we mourn, how can we protest, how can we engage deeply, when we cannot show up with our bodies, when we cannot step out of our homes? As David Harvey stated in ‘We need a collective response to the collective dilemma of coronavirus’: “I am in a frustrating position of personal isolation, at a moment when the time calls for collective forms of action.”

We want to use this moment to start thinking about how to overcome or reconfigure distancing and isolation from the perspective of embodied connectivity and the embodiment of connectivity. Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) studies on social connectivity shed insightful light on people’s civic and political participation with digital media as organizing agents. In today’s world, apart from mass protests, connectivity pervades our everyday practices. More than a logic to organize and coordinate online actions, it is increasingly intertwined with our offline world, including our affectivity and bodily experiences. As Van Dijck has stated (2013), the layer of platforms influences human interaction on an individual and a community level, as well as on a larger societal level, as online and offline worlds are increasingly interpenetrating (p. 4). How does embodiment, in its entanglement with connectivity, prompt us to rethink ourselves and our societies for the future ‘new normal’?

In the 2021 ASCA workshop, we seek to interrogate the notions of connectivity and community in all facets of society – both empirically and theoretically – through four broad, interconnected themes: 1. technology, 2. mobility, 3. activism, 4. creativity. We zoom in on these four themes to reimagine power structures, technological infrastructures, and social systems, and to explore what we may learn from the creative forms of embodied connectivity and embodiment of connectivity we encounter as we move into the future. We welcome papers from all fields within the humanities and social sciences, including artistic research.

Please submit your abstract (max. 300 words) and bio (max. 100 words) via the submission form by 31 December 2020. (If you have trouble accessing the submission form, you may instead e-mail your abstract, bio, and contact information to ascaworkshop2021@gmail.com.)

We intend to hold the workshop in the physical space of Amsterdam, but if this is not possible due to COVID-19 related restrictions, the workshop will take place in online or hybrid form. In any case, we are going to try our best to find creative ways to connect, to communicate, and to be together.

Themes

  1. Technology

How is sociality affected by and how does it in turn affect rising technologies and platforms such as TikTok, Zoom, 5G, and virtual reality? How are technologies used or adapted to support the emergence of a stay-at-home economy? What roles do technologies play in supporting or thwarting connectivity in times of crisis? Who is included and who is excluded in mediated connectivity? In what ways are social identities and communities determined by the technological tools that sustain them, and how is the future of technological connectivity imagined?

  1. Mobility
    How are subjectivities re-determined by (im)mobility? Who is excluded when governments restrict mobility? How does a lack of mobility change the definition of what it means to connect? What forms of mobility between physical and virtual communities have been developed? What can we learn from the relation between (im)mobility and connectivity for the globalized world of the future?
  2. Activism

In what ways is activism changing in these times of crisis, when the possibility to make embodied connections is limited? What ways have activism movements found to get around those limitations? What role do online platforms play in supporting activist communities in times of a pandemic? How do online protests and bodily protests in the street connect with each other? What forms of intersectional activism have been able to grow?

  1. Creativity

How have cultural institutions, artists, performers and content creators been able to form, sustain, or improve connections with their communities when meeting in person was not possible? What roles can cultural institutions play in providing online places for respite or engagement? What new forms of being together are conceptualized through creative encounters?

The 2021 ASCA International Workshop is organized by Lok Yee Wong (yveswly@gmail.com) and Jori Snels (j.snels@uva.nl).

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NICA archive 2010 – 2020

Read all articles published by Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis 2010 to 2020.