Utopic Performances: Reimagining the Common

Confronted with the acute crisis of the constitution of the common, from the representation of the citizen to its articulation in the social body, the reconfiguring capacities of utopic imagination will be examined from a variety of contemporary aesthetic reflexions and practices which redefine the relationships between peoples, institutions and their ecologies. Within the understanding that utopic practice, in the same gesture, projects modes of inhabiting still to be realised and critiques the underlying facticity of the present, in this convening thinkers, researchers, architects, curators and artists will examine the immanent impacts of utopic discourses and practices. This instance of collaborative work and search for a necessary language of understanding between academic disciplines and artistic practices, and the fluidity that unsettles these distinctions, at the antipodes of evasive illusion, seeks to emphasize and assume the very responsibility inscribed in the utopic as a mandate to make space for what has not taken place.

This event is part of a series of events organized since 2022 by the Critical Humanities Spaces Network (CHSN), which operates within the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). The CHCI acts as a global forum that strengthens the work of humanities centers and institutes through advocacy, grant-making, and inclusive collaboration. The CHSN, one of six networks sheltered by the CHCI, was founded in 2021 in order to fill what we saw as a gap in dialogues between directors of centers and institutes around the critical lives that our spaces take on, and to reflect on venues for such cross-disciplinary work as aesthetic and affective spaces in which the potential for remapping the social body is always imminent and indeed often in process. Inflected by questions of the aesthetic and the political, the focus of our conversations always come back to what happens between people, ideas, and environments within the structures of arts, humanities, and interdisciplinary centers and spaces, and on the transformative potentials they hold.

Partners

Organized by the Critical Humanities Spaces Network (CHSN, CHCI) with the support of the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL, EHESS), the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH), and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). Funding for the project was provided by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and its Membership Activity Fund.

Programme

Monday 18 November 2024

• 9h00 — Accueil café
• 9h30 — Introduction: Katharine Wallerstein and Maurits van Bever Donker

Session 1 — moderation: Andrés Claro

• 9h50 — Maurits van Bever Donker (Centre for Humanities Research, UWC; CHCI Critical Humanities Spaces Network), In the Press of History
• 10h20 — Marta Segarra (CNRS; Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité), Rereading Kinship
• 10h50 — Katharine Wallerstein (CHCI Critical Humanities Spaces Network; CHR, UWC), Utopic Temporalities
• 11h20 — Discussion
• 12h15 — Pause déjeuner

Session 2 — Reverberations of an Echo — moderation: Patricia Parker

• 13h30 — Introduction: Patricia Parker and Fiamma Montezemolo
• 13h40 — Fiamma Montezemolo (UC Davis), film: Echo
• 14h20 — Discussion
• 14h45 — Pause café

Session 3 — moderation: Katharine Wallerstein

• 15h05 — Julien Beller (le 6b; Julien Beller Architecte), Quelle architecture pour les communs ?
• 15h35 — Judit Carrera (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona), Public Space and Democracy: the role of architecture and the arts
• 16h05 — Andrés Claro (Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios en Filosofía, Artes y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile; CHCI Critical Humanities Spaces Network), Figures of Utopia: Poetic Topologies — Communal Topologies
• 16h35 — Discussion

Tuesday 19 November 2024

• 9h00 — Accueil café

Session 4 — moderation: Maurits van Bever Donker

• 9h35 — Özge Derman (Sciences Po; Sorbonne), Performative transitions in time and space: activism through art in social movements
• 10h05 — Madeleine Planeix-Crocker (CRAL-EHESS), Le Plateau: A Conversation Piece
• 10h35 — Philippe Roussin (CNRS; CRAL-EHESS), Ecotopia : utopie et responsabilité
• 11h05 — Discussion
• 12h15 — Pause déjeuner
• 14h00 — Visite au 6b, Saint-Denis