kuda.org recommends: And Others Network on the The International Symposium, 06 & 07 December, 2023, Lisbon
And Others Network on the The International Symposium The lost-and-found revising art stories in search of potential changes
06 & 07 December, 2023 | Lisbon
The International Symposium
The lost-and-found: revising art stories in search of potential changes is a series of three events in three locations: Lisbon, Warsaw, Riga.
The first event is hosted by the Art History Institute at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal, December 6-7, 2023.
The following two events will take place in Warsaw, March 2024, and in Riga, June 2024.
'I lost a few goddesses while moving south to north, and also some gods while moving east to west.
I let several stars go out for good, they cannot be traced. An island or two sank on me, they're lost at sea. I'm not even sure exactly where I left my claws, who's got my fur coat, who's living in my shell.
My siblings died the day I left for dry land and only one small bone recalls that anniversary in me.
I've shed my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs, taken leave of my senses time and again. I've long since closed my third eye to all that, washed my fins of it and shrugged my branches.
Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me how little now remains, one first person sing, temporarily declined in human form, just now making such a fuss about a blue umbrella left yesterday on a bus.'
Wisława Szymborska A Speech at the Lost-And-Found (1972)
(from Wisława Szymborska Poems New and Collected (1998) trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, Harcourt Brace International)
Losing things, or realising their lack, usually causes a feeling of deep disorientation, distress,
helplessness or anger. These feelings are felt across the loss of objects, identities, ideas, sense,
language, bonds, and power. Similar emotions are revealed through the verses of A Speech at the
Lost-And-Found (1972) by 1996 Literature Nobel Lauriat, Wisława Szymborska. The Polish poet
grieves for the loss of community with/in the world. When disrupted and confused worldly
relationships accompany (mis)understandings of works of art as treasures, carefully evaluated and
classified by experts but isolated from everyday life. Perhaps this moment of loss and confusion
offers us a chance to uncover a new art-storical paradigm that focuses on building intra-relational
ecologies founded on care, attentiveness and respect. We are hopeful that losing that to which we
have become accustomed may allow us attend to abandoned possibilities and missed chances, and
enable us to unlearn hierarchical and violent ways of building knowledge, including art as a vehicle of
sustaining power structures.
In this symposium, we propose to critically engage with the noticeable shift in understanding the
paradigm of art. This departs from ‘interpreting’ and ‘decoding’, towards a physical, affective and
material experiencing within diverse contexts and communities.
Objects approached from a new contemporary perspective may be revealed as lost, but at the same
time, also (re)found, allowing for the negotiation potentials of their uses, understandings and
performativity. Attending to relations and things that were once discarded as unworthy enables us to
unlearn, and re-define existing concepts of identity relationships (gender, class, ethnic, spiritual,
familial) and unearth forgotten rituals, languages and stories (her-stories, it-stories, their-stories). We
question the circumstances and contexts, and the presence and performativity of objects (considered
as having artistic qualities) within spaces to reveal neglected, disregarded, ignored or lost
potentials.
Szymborska’s poem encourages us to leave the itineraries to which we have become accustomed
and to distance ourselves from a priori discourses - technocratic thinking and bureaucratic controls -
that have maintained accepted patterns of power and control. We are not interested in ‘speak back’
narratives, instead everything that has been found or recovered has been subjected to
transformations, hybridisations, mutations and disintegration.
Imagined as a series of three events in three locations in order to emphasise the importance of local
socio-cultural and political contexts, we consider the practical and beneficial role of art objects and
the space(s) they create for and towards their users. The arts’ ability to provoke curiosity, wonder,
joy and pleasure activates attentiveness, respect and gratitude. We explore the diverse and varied
existences of art objects, their manifestations and status, and interrogate the space of art and the
materiality it offers with regard to its potential to foster and support empathy, responsibility and
response-ability towards others and care for and about a better communal life.
The discussions and dialogues during the events are intended to be attentive to the connections and
relations constituted through and alongside art but also of those marginalised and/or peripheral
subjects, including the non-human.
Each location navigates the constellation of issues explored through interventions that challenge
traditional conference or symposium formats.
Within the above framework concerning a paradigm shift, in Lisbon we focus on artistic, curatorial,
institutional, academic practices and artistic research that engage with art objects, art works,
collectives and exhibitions that respond to the following thematic constellations based on
Szymborska’s poem:
1st thematic constellation: STARS and GODDESSES
● Alternative ways of thinking and building knowledge (including, but not limited to assemblage and/ or tentacular thinking; practices of unlearning and undoing; epistemologies of ignorance, creative unknowing, building knowledges anew; non-anthroponormative languages and non-human approaches; decentering his-storical framings towards her-stories, it-stories, their-stories and other-stories;
● The role of spirituality and faiths in the context of decolonisation and endogenic concepts of progression (change);
● The role of materiality and corporeality in imagining new methodologies.
Photo: Karolina Freino, Confluence. The Monument to Emma Goldman, 2017.
6 December
09:00 Registration and Welcome
Colégio Almada Negreiros - Salão Nobre (Tv. Estevão Pinto, 1099-032)
9:30-11:00 Gloves-stories (object-based workshop)
Małgorzata Markiewicz (University of the National Education Commission in Krakow, Poland)
Colégio Almada Negreiros - Salão Nobre (Tv. Estevão Pinto, 1099-032)
11:00-11:20 Coffee Break
11:20-11:40 Loss, Feelings, and Care in the Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome
Alison Poe (Woman’s Art Journal)
Colégio Almada Negreiros - Salão Nobre (Tv. Estevão Pinto, 1099-032)
11:40-12:00 Forgotten her-stories. Decolonial practices in Latin American clay art (+ activity in clay)
Katarzyna Cytlak (Mikołaj Kopernik University, Poland)
Colégio Almada Negreiros - Salão Nobre (Tv. Estevão Pinto, 1099-032)
12:00-12:20 'God is Change': Intersectional feminism against the end of the world
Alexandra Kokoli (Middlesex University London, UK)
Colégio Almada Negreiros - Salão Nobre (Tv. Estevão Pinto, 1099-032)
12:20-13:00 Q&A
Colégio Almada Negreiros - Salão Nobre (Tv. Estevão Pinto, 1099-032)
13:00-14:30 Lunch Break
Oh Lacerda! (Av. de Berna 36 A, 1050-042)
14:30-15:40 To be a poet in the margins of the Museum (walkshop)
Marta Branco Guerreiro (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
Gulbenkian Gardens (Av. de Berna 45, 1050-078)
15:40-16:00 Coffee Break
NowHere (Rua da Cruz dos Poiais 6, 1200-350)
16:00-17:30 Writing and Thinking Together about Affective Labour and Collectivity (workshop)
Carla Cruz, Helena Reckitt and Karolina Majewska-Guede on behalf of And Others Network
NowHere (Rua da Cruz dos Poiais 6, 1200-350)
17:30-18:00 Lisbon her-stories: counter-monuments for women's visibility (talking circle)
Beatriz Laschi (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
NowHere (Rua da Cruz dos Poiais 6, 1200-350)
18:30/19:00 Dinner
Pharmacia Felicidade (Rua de Santa Catarina 2 and 4, 1249-069)
7 December
09:00-11:00 Panel: Unmaking the peripheral spaces of curiosity (w/ intro + Q&A)
Catherine Dormor ( University of Westminster, UK) - panel chair
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
-'Dangerous Grounds: Witnessing, Archive and Public Space'
Dominika Kemilä (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
- 'Material Nomads: A Feral Artist Intervention by Paula Chambers'
Paula Chambers (Leeds Arts University, UK)
- 'Natural sites of significance: the grand, the small, the sacred and the mundane'
Madara Kvepa (Art Academy of Latvia, Latvia)
11:00-11:20 Coffee Break
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
11:20-11:40 Feminist Art Making Histories
Hilary Robinson (Loughborough University, UK)
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
11:40-12:00 In (re)search of potential changes: Indignados protest art from Archivo 15-M and Princeton University Library collections
Emilia Jeziorowska (University of Wrocław, Poland)
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
12:00-12:20 'An affective biography of the sculpture of Salomea from Glogów'
Aleksandra Paradowska (Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland) and
Dorota Łuczak (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland)
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
12:20-13:00 Q&A
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
13:00-14:30 Lunch Break
Cantinho do Avillez (R. Duques de Bragança 7, 1200-162 Lisboa)
14:30-16:00 Folded memories (object-based workshop)
Ana Vivoda (University of Zadar, Croatia)
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
16:00-16:20 Coffee Break
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
16:20-16:50 'Lost-and-found within the box-assemblage' (w/ Q&A)
Lawrence Buttigieg (artist and independent researcher)
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
16:50-18:30 Panel: Spirituality and empowering women's storytelling (w/ intro + Q&A)
Anna Markowska (University of Wrocław, Poland) + Agnieszka Patala (University of Wrocław, Poland) - panel chairs
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (R. Capelo 13, 1200-087 Lisboa)
- 'Exercises for Moving Over'
Dominika Łabądź (Academy of Art in Szczecin, Poland)
- 'Reciprocity'
Susie Olczak (University of Gloucestershire, UK)
18:30-19:00 Performative Gesture (in response to the symposium discussions and explorations)
Zia Soares (artist and independent researcher)