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HAUNTOPIA / What if
The organizers of this conference invite eight EARN members – PhD candidates in the field of arts-based research – to give a 15-minute input each. If your project is concerned with the question of Hauntopia/What if as laid out in the introduction below, we encourage you to respond to this call and propose a concept for a 15-minute presentation of your work within the conference. The presentation can be given in any media or format.
Please send in a short abstract of your project and presentation to: Univ.-Prof. Renate Lorenz, r.lorenz@akbild.ac.at.
Deadline: February 15, 2017.
HAUNTOPIA / What if In this conference the concept of haunting – usually bending towards the past – will keep good company to the concept of utopia. Haunting has been employed to create a language for the ways in which an unfinished past (Gordon) or past potential futures (Eshun) make themselves known in the here and now. Violent histories or stories return and show their impacts in the course of normalcy. Haunting takes place especially when it seems that certain events of oppression and violence are over (after liberation from colonialism, after Stonewall, after the end of the war) or when their oppressiveness is strictly denied.
Signs appear – we might call them ghosts or specters –, and cause disruptions. The ghosts are alive, equipped with agency they will not subjugate under human control. They don’t “belong” to the person, who experiences them, they rather ”appear” as agency in-between subjectivities, images and space. As such, hunting always also points towards a possible future or work as an exile for our longing, of how things could be otherwise. A path not taken in the past might indicate a different trail to the future, a voice ridiculed might open up the present. In our cruisings of utopia we mingle with the presence of colonialism, with tamed revolutionary moments, suppressed knowledges and other ghosts. This is why we understand Hauntopia / What If? as a means to produce knowledge: As we conjure ghostly matters to make the unresolved social violence of the past appear in the present and demand their due, our artistic practices invite ghosts to dance and trace the possible future in the here and now.
Conference with lectures, artists’ presentations and performance.
Including: the specters of Octavia Butler and José Munoz,
Keynote lectures by Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara) and Eve
