Literature in Focus
A Dying Language and an Artist - Eugène Viala View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Catherine Parayre
Focusing on regional art, this paper posits that, in order to better understand the scope of an artist’s identification with his native culture, studying works of fiction by an author thematizing the same region may provide useful and provocative insights into the artist’s practice. To this effect, I examine the works of artist Eugène Viala (1859-1913) in the light of literary works by author Jean Boudou (1920-1975). Born in the same area – although they never met – and both attached to rurality, Viala and Boudou express a striking, at times desperate melancholy in their works – visual for one, literary for the other. Of particular interest is the fact that they are issued from a linguistic minority that has long been ostracized. The language spoken there is Occitan. Although considered for centuries to be a mere “patois,” Occitan is the traditional language of southern France. Declining since the end of the nineteenth century, it is today an endangered language. Nevertheless, there continues to be a rich Occitan literature while Occitan scholars have over the years produced a seminal critical corpus on minority literature, identity-making, and regional discourse. As words of fiction offer a privileged site to dramatize the cultural loss engaged through the loss of a language, reading such literature allows the viewer to explore in meaningful ways the visual art of an artist attached to his Occitan identity, and see why this continues to matter today.
Featured The Necessity to Name: The Search for a New Relationship with our Specters in Palimpsest, by Doris Salcedo View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carlos Gutiérrez Cajaraville
A palimpsest is a writing erased and replaced by another. Sometimes, perhaps all too often, our lives become incarnated palimpsests thanks to the prevailing biopolitics, which refers not only to the government of the living, but also to the multiple practices of dying and disappearing. Can art teach us to create new relationships with our essential ghosts, with those who refuse to abandon us despite everything? In this paper we address the work titled Palimpsest, by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958), in which she plays with those absences that are permanently present. The tears that flow from the earth itself, tracing the names of migrants who disappeared while fleeing the war, show us not only the necessity to name those who are no longer with us, but could create the basis for a kind of divinology (Meillassoux, 2006) through which new ties would be built, beyond the interested political use, between human beings and those harassing absences.
Beyond Medium - Art as Mindset: An Understanding of the Arts in the Post-material Age View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Olivia A Carye Hallstein
We live in a world where material goods are simultaneously overwhelmingly available and increasingly unnecessary. Yet, arts education is often situated within the context of medium rather than practice. In this interactive workshop, we will explore art from the basis of practice, observation, reflection, and experimentation to explode the role of artist from image-maker and materialist to creative entrepreneur, world maker, and orchestrator.
Through the Lenses of Altermodernism: Nicolas Bourriaud and Augustín Fernández Mallo View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marta del Pozo Ortea
The end goal of this intervention is to analyze the novel Nocilla Dream by the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo through the lenses of Altermodernism as proposed by the art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. The label Altermodernism was coined at the beginning of the 21st century by the art critic in order to signify a new mode of art and culture characterized by an spatial and ideological fluidity in which the subject moves toward a "radicant" identity - “caught between the need for a connection with its environment and the forces of uprooting, between globalization and singularity” (Bourriaud). In this new altermodern paradigm, the practices of mobility, hypercommunication and globalization, according to the critic, could become guarantee of a new, positive identity politics in the framework of the interrelationships among different artistic particularisms and lead to the reconstruction of the too familiar fragmentation and nihilism of the postmodern subject. In this paper I demonstrate the ways in which the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo is explicitly influenced by Bourriaud and conceptually constructs his novel Nocilla Dream (Editorial Candaya, 2006; in English by Fitzcarraldo editions, 2015) around such an altermodern paradigm.
Pandemic and Quarantine - the Shakespearean Intertextual Play “Shortly to Go” by Ilias Konteas and Dimitrios Stasinopoulos View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katerina Diakoumopoulou
In July 2020 the Brussels Shakespeare Society announced a playwriting competition, where content had to be in the English language and related to Shakespeare. The winners were Ilias Κonteas and Dimitrios Stasinopoulos with their play "Shortly to go" and they will present the play to the following FEATS (Festival of Anglophone Theater Societies, Luxembourg, in May 2022). It is a meta-existential intertextual play in two different dramatic times of action a) the time of King Lear's writing and, b) the modern pandemic age; and their common denominator is the quarantine. A Shakespearean mosaic of textuality is formed where historical dilemmas (New Historicism) emerge and function as a prism through which our time is re-examined. In this way the complex picture of the present can be understood (Agamben 54). Shakespeare is always our contemporary (Elsom 12) and this Shakespeare's critical reception is resilient but constantly needs to be updated. This paper explores these concepts of this unpublished, award-winning play.
Architectural Site and Imagined Landscape: The Foundation Lore and Perpetuated Mythology of the Round City of Baghdad View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Samantha Oleschuk
The eighth-century Abbasid capital, the Round City of Baghdad, existed in its perfect, circular form for a short period of time. However, even after its ruin, its physical shape and the reasons for its establishment were vehemently remembered in a manner unrivaled in the dense history of Islamic cities. This round city, known as Madinat al-Salam, or the City of Peace, and often described as the dome of Islam became storied. While there are no physical remains of the Round City, the intertwined legends of the city’s site, foundation, and founding caliph established (and perhaps exaggerated) through historical descriptions and stories enable architectural reconstructions of the eighth-century marvel. This foundation lore opened a sphere of myth and memory, and from this realm continued glorifications, reflections, and lamentations of the early Abbasid capital have been elicited in literature after its construction and ruin. Research and writing by scholars across disciplines including history, literature, and art and architectural history delve into the city’s foundation and its mythology as separate entities. Diverging from this dichotomy of study, this research draws a connection between the legends of its foundation and its continued mythology to suggest that the Round City of Baghdad must be studied simultaneously as an architectural site and an imagined landscape.
"Once Upon A Time": Comparing and Cataloguing Historic Fairy Tales Around the World View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matthew Hodge
"Once Upon A Time...": When these famous words are heard, it is assumed that a tale full of imaginative storytelling will unfold. Fairy tales have existed for thousands of years. Humans have used their creative imaginations to tell stories of magic, romance, adventure, and danger that teach significant morals and lessons. These stories have evolved over centuries throughout various cultures, geographical regions, and generations. One important way of considering fairy tales is exploring the various versions of the same basic stories that exist in countries all around the world — yet often with very different story specifics. These critical discussions further highlight the connections of human storytelling while reflecting cultural differences. This paper compares and contrasts global interpretations of established fairy tale story structures (including versions of 'Cinderella', 'Snow White', 'Sleeping Beauty,' and 'Rapunzel'). Additionally, the study dissects the historic ATU Index established by folklorists during the 20th and 21st centuries (arguably the most established and cited system in cataloguing popular global fairy tales) by exploring the index's structure using well-known story types (including 'Aladdin', 'Little Red Riding Hood', 'Beauty and the Beast', 'Jack and the Beanstalk', 'Hansel and Gretel', 'The Frog Prince', 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin', and 'Rumpelstiltskin') and addressing the reasoning behind certain famous fairy tales not being included in the index (including 'The Little Mermaid', 'Alice in Wonderland', 'The Snow Queen', 'The Adventures of Pinocchio', and 'Peter Pan').
