On naming, unnaming and namelessness (seminar)

Activity: Talk or presentation for an academic audienceInvited talk for an academic audience

Description

On naming, unnaming and namelessness (seminar)

In this seminar, we shall explore ‘naming’ as a technology of recognition, deconstruction and invention of reality, and explore ways in which acts of naming (or un-naming) are performed in artistic production.
We shall address different approaches to the act of naming: naming as a way to re-make reality, distancing what appears or is conjured on stage from common language; naming as a way to construct intelligibility for imagination; naming as the marking of access points to particular historical instances, scenes and traces, naming as a way to displaying forms of attachment within and beyond the scene. Likewise, we shall explore the idea of undoing the very notion of ‘name’: how artistic production has often eluded, refused, played, or transformed the standard use of ‘names’.
The seminar will have both a theoretical and a practical dimension: on the one hand, there will be sessions of inputs, where I articulate the key questions related to the topic, discussing examples in critical theory and artistic production, on the other, there will be focused sessions of responses in various forms on the students' part, which may include performance-based responses, exercises, showings of materials and discourse, respectively focusing on the issues of naming, un-naming and namelessness.
Period18 Sept 201821 Sept 2018
Held atHochschule der Künste Bern / Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland
Degree of RecognitionInternational