1994 research outputs found
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Queer Waste
Full text linkThe phrase ‘queer waste’ evokes a volley of disparate themes and images, ranging from queerness’ potential anti-reproductivity, to aesthetics that might be understood as trashy or campy, to panics about changes in gender or sex caused by the presence within ecosystems of toxicity and pollutants. More broadly, ‘queer waste’ indexes the entwinement of waste as pollution with the lives of queer people—a relation often coded by the afterlives of industrial colonialism perpetuated by global capital. In this way, ‘queer waste’ suggests a geographical orientation through which both queer bodies and lived environments cast a light on racial and carceral capital. The diverse mechanisms through which this manifests range from the corralling of underprivileged communities into so-called ‘cancer alleys’—areas in which plants emit hazardous chemicals posing heightened risk to residents’ health—to the revaluation and repurposing of electronic waste—rapidly piling-up discarded electric equipment—in certain Global South areas including in India, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. This symposium brings together scholars, artists, and members of the public to explore how such entanglements play out and are resisted and reimagined in both theoretical and fictional worlds, via film, the visual arts, literature, and scholarship
Scholarship, Activism, and the Autonomy of Social Spheres
No full textThis talk is an attempt to clarify a longstanding controversy in the history of humanities scholarship in the university, namely its relation to political activism, and to the political in general. Guillory’s hypothesis is that the appropriate frame for understanding this relation is the autonomy of social spheres, as expressed in the historical tendency of different spheres to become depoliticized over time. The paradigm case for this tendency is the depoliticization of the religious sphere with the end of the wars of religion at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He argues that depoliticization enabled the development of autonomous social spheres, resulting in many social benefits, beginning with the condition of peace following the wars of religion. At the same time, autonomous social spheres are periodically subject to re-politicization for various reasons, a tendency manifest in university scholarship at the present moment. Guillory examines several recent arguments defending the identity of scholarship with political activism, attempting to grasp thereby the forces impelling politicization and depoliticization. John Guillory is an US-American scholar and literary critic best known for his books Cultural Capital (1993) and Professing Criticism. Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022). He is the Julius Silver Professor of English Emeritus at New York University. His research focuses on rhetoric, the sociology of criticism, the history of the humanities, and early media studies
Analog World-modelling:Anticipating a Post-war World Through Architectural Models
Full text linkTheodore Conrad was an architect and master craftsman. His miniatures of Plexiglas and aluminum modelled a post-war landscape of glass-and-steel skyscrapers, sprawling business campuses, and domestic mid-century modernism from the 1930s onward. With the help of electrified tools and cameras, a vision of a world in Kodachrome arose long before it existed. Architectural modelling — long before the digital turn — became a powerful tool for testing, constructing, rendering, and selling novel architectural ideas. Teresa Fankhänel is an associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and editor-in-chief of the Architectural Exhibition Review. Her recent exhibitions include African Mobilities (2018), The Architecture Machine (2020–21), Built Together (2021), Shouldn’t You Be Working?(2023), and Andrea Canepa: As We Dwell in the Fold (2023). Among her interests are the use of technology and media for architectural design, and the history, theory, and practice of architecture exhibitions. She was a curatorial assistant for the exhibition The Architectural Model (Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 2012) and has published two books on models: The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad (2021) and An Alphabet of Architectural Models (2021). She is co-editor of the book Are You A Model?, a collection of new research on analog and digital models, which will be published in 2023
I am an Arara
No full textI am an Arara (directed by Mariana Lacerda and Rivane Neuenschwander, Brazil, 2023, 28′). A forest runs through the protests in São Paulo during the election year of 2022, a political moment in Brazil, when what was at stake was the end of democracy and the continuity of a government whose main agenda was destruction of nature and its territories, of social conquests, of indigenous peoples and quilombolas, of culture and art. The screening is followed by a discussion with Mariana Lacerda and Peter Pál Pelbart. Mariana Lacerda, born in Recife, lives and works in São Paulo. She is a documentary filmmaker. In recent years, she has dedicated her films to themes such as memory, the environment, the rights of nature, indigenous rights, and the Amerindian perspectivism. He has been a member of the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS Potsdam) scholarship programme since November 2023 for the development of a film script entitled Aña. He directed the film Gyuri (2020, 87′), filmed in 2017 in Demini, Yanomami Indigenous Land, which was shown in ten different countries around the world. More recently, he directed the film Mapping Worlds (2023, 70′). Since the 1990s, Rivane Neuenschwander, born in Belo Horizonte, chooses elements of consumer goods, social exchange, and memories as her practice’s materials. In her installations, Neuenschwander translates the intercommunicating character of living systems. In drawings, paintings, tapestries, and videos, the artist operates the intersection of her formal repertoire with science, history, psychology, linguistics, and literature in order to articulate pressing issues in contemporary politics. Attaching human action and presence to conceptual substrata, her oeuvre includes the groups that led to the forms her works take. The other is always presupposed in the structure and execution of her work, and the care applied to form always implies care toward the public. Among her recent solo exhibitions are Sementes Selvagens, Museu de Serralves (2022); Knife does not cut fire, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2021); Rivane Neuenschwander, East Tank, Tate Modern (2021). Peter Pál Pelbart is a Hungarian-born Brazilian philosopher and an essayist. He is part of the Ueinzz Theatre Company, a schizoscenic project based in São Paulo. His works are mainly about madness, time, subjectivity, and biopolitics. He published in English Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out (2015). He translated works of Deleuze into Portuguese and is co-publisher of n-1publications. He is a professor at PUC University in São Paulo
