This event starts from the body and the bodily as a crucial and critical site for reconsidering our place within an increasingly entangled and unpredictable world. In a historical moment defined by planetary climate crisis, mass extinction, volatile geopolitical relations, and the far-reaching effects of globalised capitalism, long-held assumptions about humanity’s superiority and self-sufficiency are clearly no longer tenable. Rather than treating the human as a self-contained entity, contemporary thought and artistic practice are therefore increasingly attending to bodies’ embeddedness and interdependence within wider ecological, technological and material systems. Art and theory alike are increasingly turning away from fixed objects and stable (id)entities, towards studying processes, relations, and modes of becoming in their explorations of what it means to be in the world today.
It attempts to ask how attending to the body and the bodily can open up new ways of thinking, sensing, and acting in the world. What emerges when we understand humanity not as a pre-given condition, but as an ongoing practice and set of processes that simultaneously act and are acted upon by the material world at various scales?
By bringing together perspectives from contemporary art and art history, theory, philosophy, and other forms of critical practice, this symposium considers how the body is entwined with broader political, economic, philosophical, aesthetic, and social questions.
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List of Speakers and Full Programme Details coming soon.
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Organisation Team:
Manuela Zammit is a lecturer on the Bachelor’s Media, Art, Design and Architecture (MKDA) and a PhD candidate in art history within the department of Art & Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research frequently addresses the aesthetics and politics of relationality, thresholds, and zones of convergence.
Medha Guru holds an RMA in Environmental Humanities and is currently preparing to pursue a PhD within the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research engages ethnography, biography, and more-than-human anthropology, with particular attention to sensory and embodied forms of knowledge.