- Anthropology Of Art, Cultural Politics, German Studies, Creative Industries, Theatre Anthropology, Theatre Studies, and 74 moreCross-cultural performance research, Performance ethnography (Theatre Studies), Anthropology, Performing Arts, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Theatre and Philosophy, European Theatre, Performance Studies, Anthropology of ethics and morality, Theodor Adorno, King's College, Cambridge, Bruno Latour, Cultural History, Patronage and collecting, Social Anthropology, Sociology of Arts, Theatre, Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Relational aesthetics, Theatre Directing, Work and Labour, Sociology of Work, Labour Studies, Immaterial Labour, Contemporary Art, Anthropology of Work, Art Practice as Research, Museums and Exhibition Design, Museum Studies, Cultural Heritage, Migration Studies, Identity and Alterity, Alterity, Curating, Curatorial Practice (Art), Curatorial Studies and Practice, Curating contemporary art, Museum Interpretation, Museum Anthropology, Modern and Contemporary Art, History of Exhibitions and Exhibtion Design, Curating As Critical Practice, History of Museums, New Museology, Art History, Architecture, Urban Anthropology, Colonialism, Art Theory, Practice theory, Intangible Cultural Heritage (Culture), Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Translation Studies, Ethics, Social Sciences, Ethnography, Rehearsal studies, German Literature and Culture, German Theatre, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, Philosophy of Art, Media Studies, Visual Culture, Patronage of Arts and Education, Rehearsal, Davis, Tracy C & Postlewait, Thomas, Theaterwissenschaft, Settler Colonialism & Its Legacies, Musee du quai Branly, Museums of Anthropology, Museums, and Indigeneityedit
- Jonas Tinius is a cultural and social anthropologist, whose ethnographic research grapples with the tensions between ... moreJonas Tinius is a cultural and social anthropologist, whose ethnographic research grapples with the tensions between art, migration, public institutions, and difficult heritage in Europe. He has conducted fieldwork in Germany, France, and Italy on institutionalised forms of cultural production (esp. theatres, museums, and art spaces), focusing on the reflexive agency of artistic cand curatorial work. His research is collaborative and extends into public, instigative, and multimodal fieldwork formats, such as curation and public programming.
He studied British and American Studies as well as Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Münster (Germany) before completing the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos with a focus on Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (2012). He continued to conduct doctoral fieldwork on a migrant-situated public theatre in the postindustrial Ruhr region and received his PhD (2016) for a study entitled State of the Arts. An Anthropology of German Theatre (currently under review at Cambridge University Press). At King’s College and the Division of Social Anthropology, he was supervised by Prof James Laidlaw and received the William Wyse Scholarship. During his time in Cambridge, he was founding co-convenor of the Mellon-Newton-funded Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Centre for Research on the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), and a research fellow at the theatre studies collection on Schloss Wahn, Institute of Theatre and Media, University of Cologne (Germany).
From 2016-2020, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) in the Department of European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded by Sharon Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2016-2020). As part of his research, he collaborated with artists and curators of art spaces and galleries in Berlin (among them SAVVY Contemporary, the ifa-gallery and the Wedding district gallery) to study and think about curatorial practices as forms of troubling of national, universal, and hegemonic narratives, especially against the backdrop of major museum transformations such as the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin City Castle. From 2017-2020, he acted as founding convenor of the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) together with Prof Roger Sansi. From 2017-2021, he was also coordinator of the research section and co-founder of the PostHeimat Network on migrant theatre funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and founding member of the theatre and research collective Ruhrorter.
In 2020, he took up a position as postdoctoral researcher and scientific coordinator of the ERC project Minor Universality. Narrative World Constructions After Western Universality (PI: Prof Markus Messling) at Saarland University, as part of which he curates a residency, research, and exhibition programme in collaboration with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.
He is associate member of CARMAH at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he completes a habilitation, as part of which he completes a second book manuscript based on his postdoctoral research and teaches. Together with Prof Alex Flynn, he coordinates the digital learning platform form*at. During the winter quarter of 2023, he will be visiting fellow at the Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance of the University of California, Los Angeles.
He is editor of a number of books, including the open-access volume Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and Heritage (with Margareta von Oswald, Leuven University Press, 2020), the two-volume reference book Der Fremde Blick. Roberto Ciulli und das Theater an der Ruhr (2020, with Alexander Wewerka, Alexander Verlag), the edited volume Otherwise. Rethinking Museums and Heritage (2018, with Sharon Macdonald et al), the special issue Micro-utopias (with Ruy Blanes, Maïté Maskens, and Alex Flynn, 2016), and the book Anthropology, Theatre, and Development (with Alex Flynn, 2015, Palgrave).
Personal website: www.jonastinius.com
Twitter: @jonastiniusedit
Ad Marginem. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Europäische Musikethnologie an der Universität zu Köln. Review by Rose Campion for Nr. 95 (2023)
Research Interests:
CaMP Anthropology blog features posts, discussions, and links at the intersections of communication, media, and performance. Based in Rice University’s Anthropology Department. 2016– Editor, Dr. Ilana Gershon, igershon@rice.edu
Research Interests:
This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have... more
This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society.
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Ethics, Theatre Studies, Social Sciences, and 14 moreEthnography, Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, Rehearsal studies, German Literature and Culture, German Theatre, Performance ethnography (Theatre Studies), Anthropology of ethics and morality, Patronage of Arts and Education, Rehearsal, Davis, Tracy C & Postlewait, Thomas, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, and Theaterwissenschaft
How can universality be addressed after the necessary epistemic and ethical critique of Western universalism? Building on such concepts as materiality and reparation, narration and translation, the series Beyond Universalism seeks to... more
How can universality be addressed after the necessary epistemic and ethical critique of Western universalism? Building on such concepts as materiality and reparation, narration and translation, the series Beyond Universalism seeks to understand how contemporary cultural and social practices are producing a new consciousness of universality-experiences, refl ections, and agencies of a shared humanity. | Comment aborder l'universel après la nécessaire critique épistémique et éthique de l'universalisme occidental ? En s'appuyant sur des concepts tels que la matérialité et la réparation, la narration et la traduction, la collection Partager l'universel cherche à comprendre comment les pratiques culturelles et sociales contemporaines produisent des expériences, réfl exions et agentivités qui contribuent à faire émerger une humanité partagée.
Research Interests:
Awkward Archives proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies.... more
Awkward Archives proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial concepts in Western thought. Presenting as such a modular curriculum on archives in their awkwardness—with the tensions, discomfort and antagonisms they pose. With case studies on Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Hahne-Niehoff Archive and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, among others.
English
230 pages
23 x 28 cm
ISBN 978-3-948212-92-9
English
230 pages
23 x 28 cm
ISBN 978-3-948212-92-9
Research Interests:
How can we rethink anthropology beyond itself? In this book, twenty-one artists, anthropologists, and curators grapple with how anthropology has been formulated, thought, and practised ‘elsewhere’ and ‘otherwise’. They do so by unfolding... more
How can we rethink anthropology beyond itself? In this book, twenty-one artists, anthropologists, and curators grapple with how anthropology has been formulated, thought, and practised ‘elsewhere’ and ‘otherwise’. They do so by unfolding ethnographic case studies from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland – and through conversations that expand these geographies and genealogies of contemporary exhibition-making. This collection considers where and how anthropology is troubled, mobilised, and rendered meaningful.
Across Anthropology charts new ground by analysing the convergences of museums, curatorial practice, and Europe’s reckoning with its colonial legacies. Situated amid resurgent debates on nationalism and identity politics, this book addresses scholars and practitioners in fields spanning the arts, social sciences, humanities, and curatorial studies.
Preface by Arjun Appadurai. Afterword by Roger Sansi
Contributors: Arjun Appadurai (New York University), Annette Bhagwati (Museum Rietberg, Zurich), Clémentine Deliss (Berlin), Sarah Demart (Saint-Louis University, Brussels), Natasha Ginwala (Gropius Bau, Berlin), Emmanuel Grimaud (CNRS, Paris), Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós (Paris), Erica Lehrer (Concordia University, Montreal), Toma Muteba Luntumbue (Ecole de Recherche Graphique, Brussels), Sharon Macdonald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Wayne Modest (Research Center for Material Culture, Leiden), Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin), Margareta von Oswald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Roger Sansi (Barcelona University), Alexander Schellow (Ecole de Recherche Graphique, Brussels), Arnd Schneider (University of Oslo), Anna Seiderer (University Paris 8), Nanette Snoep (Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne), Nora Sternfeld (Kunsthochschule Kassel), Anne-Christine Taylor (Paris), Jonas Tinius (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
The book is funded by Sharon Macdonald's Alexander Von Humboldt-Stiftung Professorship, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Leuven University Open Access Fund.
Across Anthropology charts new ground by analysing the convergences of museums, curatorial practice, and Europe’s reckoning with its colonial legacies. Situated amid resurgent debates on nationalism and identity politics, this book addresses scholars and practitioners in fields spanning the arts, social sciences, humanities, and curatorial studies.
Preface by Arjun Appadurai. Afterword by Roger Sansi
Contributors: Arjun Appadurai (New York University), Annette Bhagwati (Museum Rietberg, Zurich), Clémentine Deliss (Berlin), Sarah Demart (Saint-Louis University, Brussels), Natasha Ginwala (Gropius Bau, Berlin), Emmanuel Grimaud (CNRS, Paris), Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós (Paris), Erica Lehrer (Concordia University, Montreal), Toma Muteba Luntumbue (Ecole de Recherche Graphique, Brussels), Sharon Macdonald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Wayne Modest (Research Center for Material Culture, Leiden), Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin), Margareta von Oswald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Roger Sansi (Barcelona University), Alexander Schellow (Ecole de Recherche Graphique, Brussels), Arnd Schneider (University of Oslo), Anna Seiderer (University Paris 8), Nanette Snoep (Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne), Nora Sternfeld (Kunsthochschule Kassel), Anne-Christine Taylor (Paris), Jonas Tinius (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
The book is funded by Sharon Macdonald's Alexander Von Humboldt-Stiftung Professorship, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Leuven University Open Access Fund.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Art Theory, Museum Studies, Ethnography, Postcolonial Studies, and 9 moreContemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Colonialism, Museum Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, Post-Colonialism, Curatorial Studies and Practice, Curatorial Practice (Art), and Curating contemporary art
»Das Theater an der Ruhr war wie eine Explosion für mich. Vieles von dem, was ich heute als meins ausgebe, kommt daher.« Navid Kermani 1980 gründet Roberto Ciulli in Mülheim an der Ruhr gemeinsam mit dem Dramaturgen Helmut Schäfer und... more
»Das Theater an der Ruhr war wie eine Explosion für mich. Vieles von dem, was ich heute als meins ausgebe, kommt daher.« Navid Kermani
1980 gründet Roberto Ciulli in Mülheim an der Ruhr gemeinsam mit dem Dramaturgen Helmut Schäfer und dem Bühnenbildner Gralf-Edzard Habben das Theater an der Ruhr – ein freies, aber staatlich subventioniertes Ensembletheater, bei dem das Reisen und der Kulturaustausch zum Programm gehören. In über 35 Jahren besucht das Theater über 40 Länder und holt zugleich die Welt ins Ruhrgebiet, indem es Künstler aus u.a. Chile, Polen, Russland, Ex-Jugoslawien, Ägypten, Türkei, Iran und Irak nach Mülheim einlädt.
Die Monographie versammelt erstmals auf rund 1000 Seiten Material zu Roberto Ciullis Werdegang und Werk:
I. Von seinem Studium der Philosophie und seinem Mailänder Zelttheater Il Globo am Stadtrand, seiner Ankunft in Deutschland Mitte der 1960er-Jahre, seinen Weg vom Deutschen Theater Göttingen bei Hilpert und Fleckenstein über Köln in den 1970er-Jahren mit Hansgünther Heyme bis zu der Theatergründung in Mülheim an der Ruhr.
II. Gespräche zwischen Roberto Ciulli und dem Anthropologen Jonas Tinius: Sie sprechen über Theater als Mittel, um die Welt zu verändern, über Migration, Anthropologie und die Provinz, über eine universelle Sprache und das Clowneske, über eine selbstbestimmte Haltung zur Welt und einen fremden Blick auf sie.
III. Material (Texte, Gespräche, Dokumente) aus rund 40 Jahren internationaler Theaterarbeit im und mit dem Theater an der Ruhr.
Daneben gibt es Texte von Navid Kermani, Helmut Schäfer, Heinz-Norbert Jocks u.v.a., zahlreiche Kritiken, Reisefotos und einen Bildessay von Knut W. Maron.
https://www.alexander-verlag.com/programm/titel/430-der-fremde-blick-roberto-ciulli-und-das-theater-an-der-ruhr.html?fbclid=IwAR3UXVg6CmUuRQZQOUKKLjvWntizCsrzFkT99L-N1nhyEC04pm2ghPOvPQs
Der fremde Blick – Roberto Ciulli und das Theater an der Ruhr
Gespräche, Texte, Fotos, Material
Tinius, Jonas (Hrsg.)
Wewerka, Alexander (Hrsg.)
ersch. Mai 2020 / 1296 Seiten. 400 Abb.. 15,0 x 23,0 cm. Banderole. Fadenheftung. Hardcover. 2 Bände Mit zahlr. Abbildungen und einem Bildessay von Knut W. Maron
ISBN 978-3-89581-491-4
25,– €
1980 gründet Roberto Ciulli in Mülheim an der Ruhr gemeinsam mit dem Dramaturgen Helmut Schäfer und dem Bühnenbildner Gralf-Edzard Habben das Theater an der Ruhr – ein freies, aber staatlich subventioniertes Ensembletheater, bei dem das Reisen und der Kulturaustausch zum Programm gehören. In über 35 Jahren besucht das Theater über 40 Länder und holt zugleich die Welt ins Ruhrgebiet, indem es Künstler aus u.a. Chile, Polen, Russland, Ex-Jugoslawien, Ägypten, Türkei, Iran und Irak nach Mülheim einlädt.
Die Monographie versammelt erstmals auf rund 1000 Seiten Material zu Roberto Ciullis Werdegang und Werk:
I. Von seinem Studium der Philosophie und seinem Mailänder Zelttheater Il Globo am Stadtrand, seiner Ankunft in Deutschland Mitte der 1960er-Jahre, seinen Weg vom Deutschen Theater Göttingen bei Hilpert und Fleckenstein über Köln in den 1970er-Jahren mit Hansgünther Heyme bis zu der Theatergründung in Mülheim an der Ruhr.
II. Gespräche zwischen Roberto Ciulli und dem Anthropologen Jonas Tinius: Sie sprechen über Theater als Mittel, um die Welt zu verändern, über Migration, Anthropologie und die Provinz, über eine universelle Sprache und das Clowneske, über eine selbstbestimmte Haltung zur Welt und einen fremden Blick auf sie.
III. Material (Texte, Gespräche, Dokumente) aus rund 40 Jahren internationaler Theaterarbeit im und mit dem Theater an der Ruhr.
Daneben gibt es Texte von Navid Kermani, Helmut Schäfer, Heinz-Norbert Jocks u.v.a., zahlreiche Kritiken, Reisefotos und einen Bildessay von Knut W. Maron.
https://www.alexander-verlag.com/programm/titel/430-der-fremde-blick-roberto-ciulli-und-das-theater-an-der-ruhr.html?fbclid=IwAR3UXVg6CmUuRQZQOUKKLjvWntizCsrzFkT99L-N1nhyEC04pm2ghPOvPQs
Der fremde Blick – Roberto Ciulli und das Theater an der Ruhr
Gespräche, Texte, Fotos, Material
Tinius, Jonas (Hrsg.)
Wewerka, Alexander (Hrsg.)
ersch. Mai 2020 / 1296 Seiten. 400 Abb.. 15,0 x 23,0 cm. Banderole. Fadenheftung. Hardcover. 2 Bände Mit zahlr. Abbildungen und einem Bildessay von Knut W. Maron
ISBN 978-3-89581-491-4
25,– €
Research Interests:
The essays collected together here each explore a concept that o ers the potential to think and do museum and heritage practice otherwise – that is, to think and do museums and heritage differently from the ways in which they have more... more
The essays collected together here each explore a concept that o ers the potential to think and do museum and heritage practice otherwise – that is, to think and do museums and heritage differently from the ways in which they have more recently or more usually been done. This ‘otherwising’ is thoroughly anthropological. It draws from a disciplinary approach that seeks to explore diverse ways of doing and thinking – to
learn from other ways of being wise – in order to rethink, re-do, and transform, what might otherwise be taken for granted or unexamined.
learn from other ways of being wise – in order to rethink, re-do, and transform, what might otherwise be taken for granted or unexamined.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Museum Studies, Cultural Heritage, Heritage Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and 14 moreContemporary Art, Community Engagement & Participation, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, Provenance, Cultural Anthropology, Translocality, Provenance research, Identity and Alterity, Museum and Heritage Studies, Critical Heritage Studies, Museums of Anthropology, Critical Museology, and Anthropology of Arts
From Pussy Riot and the Arab Spring to Italian mafia dance, this collection provides an interdisciplinary analysis of relational reflexivity in political performance. By putting anthropological theory into dialogue with international... more
From Pussy Riot and the Arab Spring to Italian mafia dance, this collection provides an interdisciplinary analysis of relational reflexivity in political performance. By putting anthropological theory into dialogue with international development scholarship and artistic and activist practices, this book highlights how aesthetics and politics interrelate in precarious spheres of social life. The contributors of this innovative interdisciplinary volume raise questions about the transformative potential of participating in and reflecting upon political performances both as individual and as collectives. They also argue that such processes provide a rich field and new pathways for anthropological explorations of peoples' own reflections on humanity, sociality, change, and aspiration. Reflecting on political transformations through performance puts centre stage the ethical dimensions of cultural politics and how we enact political subjectivity.
Research Interests: Social Movements, Geography, Human Geography, Anthropology, Ethics, and 20 morePerforming Arts, Theatre Studies, Social Anthropology, Development Studies, Social Sciences, Performance Studies, International Development, Political Anthropology, Community Development, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Sustainable Development, Politics, Applied Drama/Theatre, Anthropology Of Art, Performance, Theatre Theory, Theatre for Development, Theatre, Relational aesthetics, and Antropología
Research Interests: Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Development Studies, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Theatre History, and 16 moreSocial and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Embodiment, Applied Theatre, Applied Drama/Theatre, Anthropology Of Art, Anthropology of Development, Political theatre, Ethnographic Methods, Theatre for Development, Theatre, Anthropology of ethics and morality, Augusto Boal, Artist as Ethnographer, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, and Anthropology of dance and performance
In their introduction to Anthropology, Theatre and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance, Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius do an admirable job of lending conceptual coherence to the fourteen essays comprising their edited... more
In their introduction to Anthropology, Theatre and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance, Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius do an admirable job of lending conceptual coherence to the fourteen essays comprising their edited collection. Rather than treat the variety of analytic approaches, subject matters, and social and cultural contexts thereby assembled as just part of the nature of such collections – as all-too-often seems to be the case these days – the authors take up the challenge of articulating common themes and explicating differences with gusto. Equally commendable is the way its contributions take up such common themes and, through elaborating them with regard to their respective objects and realms of inquiry, reveal their potential for ethnographic development and contextual transformation. To list only those contributions not mentioned elsewhere in this review, such objects include: reflexive alternatives to Theatre for Development in Sub-Saharan Africa (Plastow, Chapter 4); the performative dimensions of and responses to the post-genocidal gacaca courts in Rwanda (Breed, Chapter 5); the political implications of street artists moving their work off the street and into liminal realms of ‘performative invisibility’ (Schacter, Chapter 8); the politics of artistic process in contemporary Arabic theatre (Hemke, Chapter 10); or the political theatricality of the Pussy Riot trials in Putin’s Russia (Rau and Schuler, Chapters 11 and 12).
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, German Studies, Anthropology, Classics, Performing Arts, and 15 moreTheatre Studies, Humanities, Social Anthropology, Social Sciences, Dance Studies, Ethnography, Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Theater and film, Social Activism, Brazil, Ethnography (Research Methodology), Street Art, Cultural Anthropology, and Theatre
As editors, they attempt to bridge their anthropological insights, understandings and methodologies, with a broad invitation to the contributors carefully assembled in this collection: to think about political performance, applied theatre... more
As editors, they attempt to bridge their anthropological insights, understandings and methodologies, with a broad invitation to the contributors carefully assembled in this collection: to think about political performance, applied theatre and other politically engaged performative practices, about ‘developmental’ policies and challenges, about methodologies of enquiring and researching in these fields. Each of the authors adds their own rather specific voice, experience and perspective to this thought-provoking edition that should be thoroughly considered not only by theorists of applied theatre, but also theatre and performance scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and, more broadly speaking, anyone remotely interested in the manifold situational dynamics that are at play when theatre and politics, when theatre and an aspiration for change, meet.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Development Studies, Social Sciences, and 17 moreTheatre History, Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Performance Art, Applied Drama/Theatre, Theater and film, Social Activism, Performance, Protest, Political Art, Cultural Anthropology, Theatre for Development, Theatre, Artivism, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, and Musikmanagement Und Theaterwissenschaften
This contribution addresses fieldwork as an anthropological method. It discusses the surprising lack of a systematic conversation between anthropology and performance as well as theatre research since the ‘performative turn’. Seeking to... more
This contribution addresses fieldwork as an anthropological method. It discusses the surprising lack of a systematic conversation between anthropology and performance as well as theatre research since the ‘performative turn’. Seeking to clarify terminological distinctions between ethnography, fieldwork, and method, Jonas Tinius draws upon his fieldwork with a theatre in the western German Ruhr region to discusses how a complex understanding of the field and the commitments we make to fieldwork may offer possibilities for working across anthropology, performance, and theatre. It concludes with a sketch of three practical ways to think about the mixing of anthropological methods in performance research.
Research Interests: Theatre Studies, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methodology, Ethnography, Performance Studies, and 13 moreQualitative methodology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Fieldwork in Anthropology, Ethnography (Research Methodology), Rehearsal studies, Political theatre, Theatre Theory, Performance ethnography (Theatre Studies), Theatre, Rehearsal, Theater and Performance Studies, and The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre
This chapter starts from the observation that merely pointing out the broadening scope and prevalence of curating as a practice, the curator as a professional role and ‘the curatorial’ as a theoretical discourse, overlooks some of the... more
This chapter starts from the observation that merely pointing out the broadening scope and prevalence of curating as a practice, the curator as a professional role and ‘the curatorial’ as a theoretical discourse, overlooks some of the nuanced differences and shifts that occur in different exhibition constellations and curatorial fields, and fails to address reasons for the contemporary allure of the curatorial. In fact, the pervasive notion of the curator as a networking broker, who no longer requires connoisseurial competence and skills in handling objects, refers to a particular form of curating that has emerged from a relational and participatory shift in the arts, globalization and deinstitutionalization of the contemporary arts field from the 1990s onwards. It refers to an ‘independent curator’ no longer based in museums, but instead an initiator of project-based representations and thematic group shows, both gatekeeper of artistic visibility and translator of different epistemological realms no longer confined to one discipline. It also refers to a particular understanding of curatorial practice, less as an object-based and visual form of showing than as a reflection on curating itself as well as on its infrastructures, epistemologies and power relations. Focussing only on this form of curatorship, however, ignores less glamorous kinds of curating. Yet even object- based and more strongly museum-based and non-arts curating can be implicated in new assemblies of objects, relations, ideas and people (see Basu and Macdonald 2007).
Here, we look at the two central conceptual phenomena indicated in the title of this contribution: recursivity and the curatorial, before analysing the ways in which these theoretical distinctions play out and can be made sense of with respect to our own ethnographic field-sites in Berlin. These sites are themselves overlapping and expanded fields of curatorial practice, crossing the sometimes precarious membranes of museums, heritage and contemporary art. As such, they serve not as an illustration of our preceding conceptual analysis, but as themselves ways of thinking of the recursivity of the curatorial. Following from this, we interrogate not just the recursivity of the curatorial, but also its consequences for anthropological practice and theorizing.
Here, we look at the two central conceptual phenomena indicated in the title of this contribution: recursivity and the curatorial, before analysing the ways in which these theoretical distinctions play out and can be made sense of with respect to our own ethnographic field-sites in Berlin. These sites are themselves overlapping and expanded fields of curatorial practice, crossing the sometimes precarious membranes of museums, heritage and contemporary art. As such, they serve not as an illustration of our preceding conceptual analysis, but as themselves ways of thinking of the recursivity of the curatorial. Following from this, we interrogate not just the recursivity of the curatorial, but also its consequences for anthropological practice and theorizing.
Research Interests:
Our contribution seeks to render intelligible minor forms of a world-consciousness generated through social and cultural practices. Departing from Zineb Sedira's installation "Dreams Have No Titles" for the French Pavilion of the 2022... more
Our contribution seeks to render intelligible minor forms of a world-consciousness generated through social and cultural practices. Departing from Zineb Sedira's installation "Dreams Have No Titles" for the French Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale and concluding with our project's research exhibition "The Pregnant Oyster: Doubts on Universalism" at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, we discuss how narrative forms (beyond the book) produce experiences of a shared world. Shifting from an understanding of universality as effect of the universal in particular worlds, we return to the epistemological proposal of the microstoria (Ginzburg, Levi, Revel) to inverse this relation. In doing so, we suggest the concept of a minor universality, by which we describe the genesis of a universal consciousness from concrete contexts. Our notion mobilises Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the minor through their engagement with Franz Kafka. We draw on it to address the Algerian anti-colonial struggle and the practice of sonic radio resistance described in Frantz Fanon's "This is the Voice of Free Algeria". Not captured through the binary of power/resistance, minority/majority, ours/yours, the minor produces instead a potentiality for change, for the not-yet, which foreshadows and intuits a new humanity.
Research Interests:
This chapter is based on a workshop we conducted with PhD candidates attending the Summer School Restitution, Reparations, Reparation – Toward a New Global Society? held at Villa Vigoni, Italy. It offers reflections on the situated and... more
This chapter is based on a workshop we conducted with PhD candidates attending the Summer School Restitution, Reparations, Reparation – Toward a New Global Society? held at Villa Vigoni, Italy. It offers reflections on the situated and embodied experience of talking, thinking, and conceptualising repair and heritage. Starting from the work of the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, we en- visaged the possibility of a “Museum of Disrepair” and invited PhD students to analyse the impacts of such a potential site. Attia’s idea of “irreparability” was at the centre of our investigation, and we thought about the notion of “repair” in relation to the racialised body, wounded by histories of colonialism and white- ness. As the analysis shows, repairing damages does not mean to erase the physi- cal evidence of the injury, hoping for the disappearance of the violence. Rather, it is essential to acknowledge pain and damage, and to link the injury with its visi- ble scarification. Restitution, as we argue, is only an element of a wider discourse on reconciliation, decolonisation, and infrastructural changes to Europe’s narrative of world.
*Note, the entire book is open-access and the chapter is included.
*Note, the entire book is open-access and the chapter is included.
Research Interests:
Curatorial practices that address Europe’s colonial legacies through contemporary art frequently engage with constructions of alterity, difference, and otherness. Many target the ways in which institutions of artistic and cultural... more
Curatorial practices that address Europe’s colonial legacies through contemporary art frequently engage with constructions of alterity, difference, and otherness. Many target the ways in which institutions of artistic and cultural production reproduce ethnic and geographic forms of othering. The practices on which I focus in this chapter build on a range of critiques articulated in anti-racist, feminist, and intersectional approaches to curating and artistic production (Bayer, Kazeem-Kaminski and Sternfeld 2017, Oswald and Tinius 2020). At the heart of those practices is a ‘double presence of difference’, that is to say, difference as both a subject of positive identity-formation and an object of critique, an obstacle to social justice and a political strategy for its attainment (Ndikung and Römhild 2013). Markers of identity such as race, gender, class, and regional and cultural belonging can indicate symptoms of structural discrimination and exclusion, yet they also allow for the formulation of subject positions that can challenge hegemonic, normative, and canonical structures.
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This chapter offers an ethnographic analysis of two choreographic projects-The Sysmograph (2019) by Pélagie Gbaguidi, which addressed the Venetian Museo del Manicomio. La follia reclusa in the context of the Ultrasanity symposium in... more
This chapter offers an ethnographic analysis of two choreographic projects-The Sysmograph (2019) by Pélagie Gbaguidi, which addressed the Venetian Museo del Manicomio. La follia reclusa in the context of the Ultrasanity symposium in Venice and the planned contribution of Dorothée Munyaneza on the Marseille ethnographic collections in the framework of a symposium during Manifesta 13 (2021). Both choreographies are analysed as performances that sense and mediate traumatic pasts, object agency, and the continuation of modern legacies in museums. The objective of this contribution is to open a discussion on the possibilities of choreographies and dance not as illustrative practices, but as mediating, embodied, translated investigations of active matter, difficult heritage, and the traumatic pasts inscribed in museological narratives, objects, and spaces.
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“What happens in that space in-between and beyond this relation” (Conversation between Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the... more
“What happens in that space in-between and beyond this relation” (Conversation between Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven University Press, pp. 278-287.
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“Suggestions for a Post-Museum” (Conversation between Nanette Snoep, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 324-335.
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"Dissonant Agents and Creative Refusals" (Conversation with Natasha Ginwala, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp.... more
"Dissonant Agents and Creative Refusals" (Conversation with Natasha Ginwala, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 242-253.
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“Translating the Silence” (Conversation between le peuple qui manque, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. pp.... more
“Translating the Silence” (Conversation between le peuple qui manque, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. pp. 210-221.
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“Finding Means to Cannibalise the Anthropological Museum” (Conversation between Toma Muteba Luntumbue, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius), in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven:... more
“Finding Means to Cannibalise the Anthropological Museum” (Conversation between Toma Muteba Luntumbue, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius), in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 174-185.
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“Against the Mono-Disciplinarity of Ethnographic Museums” (Conversation between Clémentine Deliss, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius), in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven... more
“Against the Mono-Disciplinarity of Ethnographic Museums” (Conversation between Clémentine Deliss, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius), in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven University Press, pp. 130-141.
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“On Decolonising Anthropological Museums: Curators Need to Take ‘Indigenous’ Forms of Knowledge More Seriously” (Conversation between Anne-Christine Taylor, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius), in Across Anthropology. Troubling... more
“On Decolonising Anthropological Museums: Curators Need to Take ‘Indigenous’ Forms of Knowledge More Seriously” (Conversation between Anne-Christine Taylor, Margareta von Oswald, and Jonas Tinius), in Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven University Press, pp. 97-105.
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“Museums are Investments in Critical Discomfort”, Wayne Modest in Conversation with Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven University Press, pp.... more
“Museums are Investments in Critical Discomfort”, Wayne Modest in Conversation with Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius, in: Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. Leuven University Press, pp. 65-75.
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A dialogue between Margareta von Oswald, Jonas Tinius and Nora Sternfeld on curating, curatorial subjectivity and contradictions. Book Title: Across Anthropology Book Subtitle: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial... more
A dialogue between Margareta von Oswald, Jonas Tinius and Nora Sternfeld on curating, curatorial subjectivity and contradictions.
Book Title: Across Anthropology
Book Subtitle: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial
Book Editor(s): Margareta von Oswald, Jonas Tinius
Published by: Leuven University Press. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv125jqxp.24
Book Title: Across Anthropology
Book Subtitle: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial
Book Editor(s): Margareta von Oswald, Jonas Tinius
Published by: Leuven University Press. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv125jqxp.24
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This chapter speaks to this problematic by highlighting how two curators – and a number of artists with whom they collaborated – grapple with this ambivalent intersection and such membranes between ‘inside work’ in Berlin’s Galerie... more
This chapter speaks to this problematic by highlighting how two curators – and a number of artists with whom they collaborated – grapple with this ambivalent intersection and such membranes between ‘inside work’ in Berlin’s Galerie Wedding and the ‘outside life’ of the district and its cultural politics that mandates the gallery. I do so by focusing on how its curatorial team struggled to address the very limits and possibilities afforded with the porous membranes of the gallery – the negotiation of a threshold, whose varying porosity encapsulates and is constitutive of the gallery’s ambivalent status in the district. Its large floor-to-ceiling windows, often incorporated into exhibitions, act as literal thresholds between the inside of the gallery and its outside.
The gallery itself is also a threshold as a contemporary art institution. It is situated in a largely migrant and working-class district – more precisely, in the district’s social security office – with a public mandate to engage with this urban social context. And yet, the gallery is clearly articulated by the curatorial duo, and thus tasked by public cultural policymakers who appointed them, to be a contemporary arts space, connected to scenes of artistic production that are “based in Berlin, but not defined by their location”, as the curators put it to me. Their curatorial programmes, called Post-Otherness Wedding (POW) (2015-2017) and Unsustainable Privileges (UP) (2017-2019) speak to this ambivalent process and task, which I unravel in this chapter.
The gallery itself is also a threshold as a contemporary art institution. It is situated in a largely migrant and working-class district – more precisely, in the district’s social security office – with a public mandate to engage with this urban social context. And yet, the gallery is clearly articulated by the curatorial duo, and thus tasked by public cultural policymakers who appointed them, to be a contemporary arts space, connected to scenes of artistic production that are “based in Berlin, but not defined by their location”, as the curators put it to me. Their curatorial programmes, called Post-Otherness Wedding (POW) (2015-2017) and Unsustainable Privileges (UP) (2017-2019) speak to this ambivalent process and task, which I unravel in this chapter.
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While it might seem as though only one thing is certain about anthropology – namely, that it is in “a permanent identity crisis” (Geertz 2000: 89) – this volume takes a different look at what anthropology is and how it is rendered... more
While it might seem as though only one thing is certain about anthropology – namely, that it is in “a permanent identity crisis” (Geertz 2000: 89) – this volume takes a different look at what anthropology is and how it is rendered meaningful. After decades of intense and productive critique of anthropological practices and knowledge production from ‘within’, we address the ways in which anthropology has been reformulated, rethought, and even repractised ‘elsewhere’ and ‘otherwise’. What is anthropology? Where and how is it negotiated? What new understandings of anthropology emerge from beyond the classical fields, practices, institutions, and modi of anthropological knowledge production?
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‘Mapping Diversities in Austria, Belgium, and Germany. An introduction to the polyvalent politics of diversity and the difficulties of dis-othering’ (with Tonica Hunter and Naomi Ntakiyica), in: Beyond Afropolitan & Other Labels: On the... more
‘Mapping Diversities in Austria, Belgium, and Germany. An introduction to the polyvalent politics of diversity and the difficulties of dis-othering’ (with Tonica Hunter and Naomi Ntakiyica), in: Beyond Afropolitan & Other Labels: On the Complexities of Dis-Othering as a Process, edited by Kathleen Louw et al. Brussels: BOZAR, pp. 11–14.
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Jonas Tinius and Sharon Macdonald. 2020. 'The recursivity of the curatorial’, in: The Anthropologist as Curator, edited by Roger Sansi. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 35-58. Link:... more
Jonas Tinius and Sharon Macdonald. 2020. 'The recursivity of the curatorial’, in: The Anthropologist as Curator, edited by Roger Sansi. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 35-58.
Link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-anthropologist-as-curator-9781350081918/
Link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-anthropologist-as-curator-9781350081918/
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This chapter analyses monumentality along two axes: centrality as a spatial horizontality and as a vertical temporality. We take the rebuilding of the Berlin Stadtschloss, or City Palace, and its overarching conceptual framing as the... more
This chapter analyses monumentality along two axes: centrality as a spatial horizontality and as a vertical temporality. We take the rebuilding of the Berlin Stadtschloss, or City Palace, and its overarching conceptual framing as the Humboldt Forum, as a case study.Built on the cleared-up remains of the previous City Palace and the German Democratic Republic’s parliamentary building, the Palast der Republik, the Palace has become a projection screen for reconstructed and appropriated universalisms and centralities of Germany’s and indeed the Global East’s past, thus echoing the topographical and psychoana- lytic heuristics for describing Berlin’s role in European imagination and socialist history more broadly.1 The Forum functions as a conceptual frame, espoused for the multiple institutions contained within the rebuilt Palace. It claims to contain a link to universalism by rewriting Prussian imperialism as a Humboldtian cosmopolitanism that allows it to encom- pass, in supposedly progressive and horizontal gestures, all the cultures of the world. Housing selected sections of the vast collections of the Museum of Asian Art and the Ethnological Museum, among other insti- tutions and collections, it presents itself as a forum for seeing into, and encountering, the world, from Berlin. At the same time as it thus proposes a horizontal expansionist cosmopolitanism, it is also built on a vertical temporality, a deep historical recurrence of centrality illustrated by the fact that the Forum emerges on the remains of several previous centres of power, including the previous Prussian Stadtschloss and the socialist Palast der Republik. These two axes, along which we discuss aspects of the ongoing reimagining of heritage for Germany’s cosmopolitan futures, serve as potential lenses to take a closer look at the notion of centrality in twentieth-century urban space and the future of past heritage.
'Phantom Palaces: Prussian Centralities and Humboldtian Horizontalities’ (with Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll), in: Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski. Eds. Re-Centring the City. Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity. London: UCL Press. (Open-access), pp. 90–103.
LINK: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10089953/1/Re-Centring-the-City.pdf
'Phantom Palaces: Prussian Centralities and Humboldtian Horizontalities’ (with Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll), in: Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski. Eds. Re-Centring the City. Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity. London: UCL Press. (Open-access), pp. 90–103.
LINK: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10089953/1/Re-Centring-the-City.pdf
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Field notes are fragments, reflections, traces of experiences recorded by a researcher during or after ‘field research’. In this case, I composed these fragments mostly by hand or typed them on my phone over the course of nearly two years... more
Field notes are fragments, reflections, traces of experiences recorded by a researcher during or after ‘field research’. In this case, I composed these fragments mostly by hand or typed them on my phone over the course of nearly two years of fieldwork, during which I accompanied Galerie Wedding’s Post-Otherness Wedding and Unsustainable Privileges programme. As curators Solvej Ovesen and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung often put it, I have been their ‘local anthropologist’ – a designation I gladly embraced, seeing that I did indeed live close by and do research on institutions in Berlin to reflect on, and talk about past, present, and planned exhibitions, unlike the trope of those anthropologist who study subjects in ‘foreign’ geographies and ‘other’ cultures. The gallery programmes POW and UP invited Berlin-based contemporary artists to probe ways in which alterity, difference, and privilege articulate in the city. Against the backdrop of the Humboldt Forum, I was interested in finding out what curatorial strategies and reflections evoke to make us think differently about migration, otherness, privileges. Field notes are recorded during or after an event or a meeting, and they are thus subject to memory, the unconscious bias of the note-taker, and of course the inter-subjective and affective situations from which they arise. As such, they are palimpsests of lived experiences, records of collective atmospheres, but also reflections and analyses of lesser-noted, behind-the-scenes, or seemingly marginal aspects of exhibition-making; field notes as footnotes to a curatorial process. These notes are not objective records to document events, but a quasi-archive of a collective curatorial practice written not from the desk, but on the spot. They aim to translate, but also to generate new gaps, new frictions.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, Curating, and 7 moreVisual Arts, Modern and Contemporary Art, Curating contemporary art, History of Exhibitions and Exhibtion Design, Museum of Anthropology & Archaeology, Curating As Critical Practice, and anthropology of curating
Research Interests: Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Refugee Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, and 11 moreMigration, Applied Theatre, Anthropology Of Art, Performance, Migration Studies, Theatre, Refugee theatre, Theatre Arts, Anthropology of migration, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, and Theatre and Migration
Contemporary European theatre builds on many traditions, yet two seem particularly at odds: wandering theatre troupes and publicly funded municipal theatre institutions. While the Italian commedia dell’arte, the French théâtre de la foire... more
Contemporary European theatre builds on many traditions, yet two seem particularly at odds: wandering theatre troupes and publicly funded municipal theatre institutions. While the Italian commedia dell’arte, the French théâtre de la foire or the German Wandertruppen frequently appear as marginalised, itinerant phenomena in theatre histories, the public city, state or national theatres of these three countries embody aristocratic patronage, bourgeois audiences and artistic continuity. This contrast has not always and everywhere been as crass, however. While nineteenth-century Germany did indeed see the gradual erosion of wandering troupes, a few well-known European theatre artists of the twentieth century have kept up a tradition that brings together civic engagement, public patronage, and transnational aesthetics with the institutionalised traditions of European public theatres. Among others, Dario Fo, the theatre anthropologist Eugenio Barba, and the founderof the festival d’Avignon in France, Jean Vilar, need mention here. This contribution adds another chapter to this historiography by focusing on the often overlooked but complex artistic tradition of Roberto Ciulli’s Theater an der Ruhr in the German postindustrial Ruhr valley city Mülheim.
‘Artistic Diplomacy: On Civic Engagement and Transnational Theatre', in: Breed, Ananda and Tim Prentki. (eds.) Performance and Civic Engagement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 269-300.
‘Artistic Diplomacy: On Civic Engagement and Transnational Theatre', in: Breed, Ananda and Tim Prentki. (eds.) Performance and Civic Engagement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 269-300.
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 10 moreAnthropology of Performance, Anthropology Of Art, Anthropology of Europe, Commedia dell'arte, German Theatre, Theatre, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, Anthropology of dance and performance, Anthropology of Arts, and Urban Ethnography, State of the Art, New Developments.
The two cases I am drawing on for this chapter are very different in scope, and I shall be using them for commentary and analysis, respectively. One is the 2012 Gurlitt Nazi art trove in Munich; a shorthand for the state-led investigation... more
The two cases I am drawing on for this chapter are very different in scope, and I shall be using them for commentary and analysis, respectively. One is the 2012 Gurlitt Nazi art trove in Munich; a shorthand for the state-led investigation into the provenance of the art collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a Nazi art dealer who partook in the organized confiscation and trade of “degenerate art,” that is, mostly modern art deemed “un-German” and thus sanctioned, sold, and devalued by the Nazi regime. As part of a wider set of inquiries into restitution and provenance, this case sheds light onto the imbrication of legal and economic issues around ownership, aesthetic judgment, and difficult heritage. Drawing on discussions of provenance research and the social life of things, my commentary on this case shows how these artworks become “suspicious” or “difficult” objects that refract, sever, and initiate social relations. By comparing a critical reading of the Gurlitt case to an analysis of renowned Berlin-based contemporary art project space SAVVY Contemporary’s Colonial Neighbours Archive project, I hope to illuminate the category of awkward art through its relational and prismatic qualities. I conclude with a view to how this can help us better understand both how curatorial processes are disrupted by instances of awkward art, and how future relations can be initiated precisely on the basis of such awkwardness.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Archives, and 25 moreAnthropology Of Art, Contemporary Arts, Provenance, Curating, Degenerate Art, Curatorial Studies and Practice, Curatorial Practice (Art), Cultural Anthropology, Art Market, Colonial Archives, Modern and Contemporary Art, Provenance research, Nazi Germany, Berlin, Decolonial Thought, Art History, Exhibition History, Museum and Curating Studies, Art Dealer, Curating contemporary art, Nazi-Era Provenance Research, Curating As Critical Practice, Restitution Issues, Anthropology of Arts, Museums and Curating, Hildebrand Gurlitt, and Curating and Contemporary Art
Aufbauend auf der Beobachtung, dass die postfordistische Arbeitswelt und deren arbeitende Subjekte durch ästhetisierte Kreativitätsdispositive gekennzeichnet sind (siehe dazu Boltanski/Chiapello 2007 [1999]; Reckwitz 2012 [1995]),... more
Aufbauend auf der Beobachtung, dass die postfordistische Arbeitswelt und deren arbeitende Subjekte durch ästhetisierte Kreativitätsdispositive gekennzeichnet sind (siehe dazu Boltanski/Chiapello 2007 [1999]; Reckwitz 2012 [1995]), skizziert dieser Beitrag eine weitere Dimension postfordistischer Arbeitsverhältnisse, die leider häufig bloß anekdotisch erwähnt wird: die Beziehung von Künstler_Innen zu ihrer Arbeit. Genauer gesagt geht es im Folgenden um die Beziehung von Künstler_innen zu Aspekten ihrer Arbeit, die als prototypisch für das kreative „unternehmerische Selbst“ (Bröckling 2007) stehen. Zum Prototypischen dieser Form von Arbeit zählt vor allem die authentische und selbstbestimmte Organisation, Flexibilität, sowie die Projektarbeit. In diesem Beitrag diskutiere ich unter anderem, inwiefern solche Formen von Arbeit in künstlerischen Prozessen re ektiert, aber auch kritisiert und neu entworfen werden. Ich setze mich als Forschungsgegenstand mit einem Netzwerk aus der sogenannten Freien Szene der darstellenden Künstler_innen in Deutschland auseinander, da in diesem Milieu zentrale Aspekte der post-fordistischen Arbeitsweise nicht nur arbeitsbestimmend sind, sondern auch auf eine komplexe Weise ambivalent.
Research Interests: Theatre Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, Anthropology of Organizations, German Theatre, and 10 moreTheatre, Anthropology of Labour, Postfordism, German Theatre and Drama, Creative Labour, Fordism and Post-Fordism, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, Musikmanagement Und Theaterwissenschaften, Anthropology of Arts, and freie Szene
‘The privilege of life itself: sovereignty, power, and the figure of the refugee’, in: Bare Lives. [Exhibition catalogue, edited by Mario Rizzi, based on an exhibition curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Solvej Helweg Ovesen.]... more
‘The privilege of life itself: sovereignty, power, and the figure of the refugee’, in: Bare Lives. [Exhibition catalogue, edited by Mario Rizzi, based on an exhibition curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Solvej Helweg Ovesen.] Berlin: Archive books, pp. 68–75.
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„Der Schauspieler“, so formulierte es der philosophische Anthropologe Helmuth Plessner in seinem Aufsatz Zur Anthropologie des Schauspie- lers, „stellt Menschen dar“. Als ein „Verhältnis seiner selbst zu sich selbst“ beschreibt Plessner... more
„Der Schauspieler“, so formulierte es der philosophische Anthropologe Helmuth Plessner in seinem Aufsatz Zur Anthropologie des Schauspie- lers, „stellt Menschen dar“. Als ein „Verhältnis seiner selbst zu sich selbst“ beschreibt Plessner die dem Theater als Kunstform eigene Situation des Schauspielers, zugleich Subjekt und Objekt seiner Arbeit zu sein: „Ein Mensch verkörpert einen anderen. Nirgends sonst wird uns das gezeigt." Plessners Formulierung ist eine anthropologisch bemerkenswerte Beobachtung zur theatralen Subjektivierung von Schauspielenden durch sich selbst, weist jedoch auch auf interessante Problemstellungen für ein Theater hin, das sich der Selbstdarstellung und der Darstellung von authentischen Schicksalen und Lebenswelten widmet, etwa von Minderheiten und Geflüchteten. Jérôme Bels Produktion Disabled Theatre mit dem Theater HORA – das sich selbst als das „einzige professionelle Theater der Schweiz, dessen Ensemblemitglieder alle eine [...] ‚geistige Behinderung‘ haben“, bezeichnet – verwischt beispielsweise bewusst die Grenzen zwischen ‚Authentizität‘ und Rollenspiel, indem Schauspielende dezidiert dazu aufgefordert werden, ‚sich selbst darzustellen‘. Solche theatralen Praktiken, die sich der Selbstdarstellung von Menschen widmen, werfen hier gerade deshalb interessante Fragen auf, da es sich eben nicht wie nach Plessner um die Verkörperung von einem Menschen durch einen ‚anderen‘ handelt, sondern um Menschen, die sich selbst darstellen. Wer verkörpert hier wen oder wessen Idee, wenn ‚man selbst‘ oder ‚das Selbst‘ auf der Bühne zum Auftritt eingeladen wird? Welche Formen der Subjektivierung und Rahmungen von Selbstdarstellungen kommen hier zum Vorschein?
Research Interests: Theatre Studies, Refugee Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Performance, and 11 moreDrama In Education, Applied Theatre, Applied Drama/Theatre, Anthropology Of Art, Theatre Theory, Anthropology of ethics and morality, Refugee theatre, Drama and theatre studies, Anthropology Of Institution, Applied Drama/Theatre, Education, performing arts, and The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre
‘Foreword: The charitable relation’, in: Art as a Medium for Action. [Exhibition catalogue, edited by Gyunel Rustamova, curated by Cinthia Willaman.] London: Langham Press, pp. 4–6.
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Germany’s so-called ‘Freies Theater’ (free theatre) exists as a plethora of diverse theatre groups and forms of organizations (collectives, networks, groups) that work outside of institutions and already fixed structures: ‘the conditions... more
Germany’s so-called ‘Freies Theater’ (free theatre) exists as a plethora of diverse theatre groups and forms of organizations (collectives, networks, groups) that work outside of institutions and already fixed structures: ‘the conditions of productions are designed by themselves — insofar as the economic constraints allow’ (Annemarie Matzke, 2012). Such a free theatre scene, she continues, thus always works on two levels: on their productions and on the reflection of their own institutionalization: unlike public theatres nominated by municipal politicians, ‘how, with whom and where to produce are among those questions that every project in the free scene has to ask itself again and again’ (Matzke, ibidem).
This article offers reflections on an artistic network of German freelance performing artists, the cobratheater.cobra network, founded at the University of Hildesheim in 2008. Its organizing ideology is one of radical aesthetic autonomy and mobile flexibility: there is no central organizing committee and productions can be realized autonomously by members of the network, thus allowing for a plethora of productions spread across Germany with different institutional affiliations.
This article describes and discusses some of the strategies elaborated by the network in order to continue working and living as mobile, autonomous, free performing artists in contemporary Germany.
This article offers reflections on an artistic network of German freelance performing artists, the cobratheater.cobra network, founded at the University of Hildesheim in 2008. Its organizing ideology is one of radical aesthetic autonomy and mobile flexibility: there is no central organizing committee and productions can be realized autonomously by members of the network, thus allowing for a plethora of productions spread across Germany with different institutional affiliations.
This article describes and discusses some of the strategies elaborated by the network in order to continue working and living as mobile, autonomous, free performing artists in contemporary Germany.
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Social Networks, and 15 moreTheatre History, German History, Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Applied Drama/Theatre, Anthropology Of Art, Precarity, German Theatre, Theatre, Precariat, Fordism and Post-Fordism, Contemporary Performance Art in the Context of Digital Arts and New Media, Precarious work, and Music and Performing Arts
Paul Klee’s framing remarks set three agendas, along which I would like to elaborate this article: 1) artistic creation may originate from a single originating originator, yet it mediates relational situations that go beyond singular... more
Paul Klee’s framing remarks set three agendas, along which I would like to elaborate this article: 1) artistic creation may originate from a single originating originator, yet it mediates relational situations that go beyond singular authorship; 2) works of art are often not starting points of such situations, but connectors, conduits of existing social, political, aesthetic dynamics; and 3) while artistic creation problematizes difference andduplication, forms of analysis are often either already a part of them, or implied by them, making them apt sites for a reflection on social relations or political subjectivity. This article seeks to contribute to a discussion on what sets such artistic and anthropological workings and collaborations in motion. In order to do so, I discuss specific conjunctions between ethnographic and artistic investigations that have sought cross-fertilizations, before elaborating the particular case of Ethnographic Conceptualism (ec). Following this conversation with anthropological and artistic theories of relationality and representation, I discuss works by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Jonas Staal as ethnographically-inspired inquiries into colonial (self-)replication. Their projects give substance to my claim that by recourse to ethno- graphic conceptualism, they can be analyzed as social infrasculptures exposing non-identical forms of replica- tion and repetition.
Research Interests: Archaeology, Anthropology, Philosophy, Art History, Social Sciences, and 16 moreMuseum Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Actor Network Theory, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Computer Networks, Colonialism, Gilles Deleuze, Post-Colonialism, History of Art, Artistic Research, Curatorial Practice (Art), Databases, Paul Klee, Software, Cave Painting, and Science and Technology Studies
The argument of this chapter is that disciplined forms of self reflection and aesthetic cultivation can be mobilised as themselves political moments during the creative process of a theatre project. Such a process of discipline and... more
The argument of this chapter is that disciplined forms of self reflection and aesthetic cultivation can be mobilised as themselves political moments during the creative process of a theatre project. Such a process of discipline and self-cultivation represents an ethico-aesthetic technology. Based on fiften months of fieldwork with a critical public theatre, this chapter discusses a participatory and site-specific project with refugees in an abandoned asylum camp in Germany's postindustrial Ruhr valley.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Ethics, Development Studies, Performance Studies, Refugee Studies, and 13 moreCritical Pedagogy, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Reflexivity, Applied Drama/Theatre, Anthropology Of Art, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Migration Studies, Foucault and education, Anthropology of ethics and morality, Germany, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, and Refugee memory
This collection aims to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of political performance, juxtaposing ethnography and anthropological theory to highlight how dimensions of aesthetics and politics can interrelate to create new forms of... more
This collection aims to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of political performance, juxtaposing ethnography and anthropological theory to highlight how dimensions of aesthetics and politics can interrelate to create new forms of sociality. This, we argue, is key to understanding how political performances can make innovative contributions to international development and political debates on the role of artistic expression, as people’s experiences and wishes for social, economic, political and cultural change can entirely determine what development and transformation mean on a quotidian level.
Research Interests: Social Movements, Anthropology, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Development Studies, and 21 moreTheatre History, Art Theory, Performance Studies, Postdramatic theatre, Political Anthropology, Community Development, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Applied Theatre, Applied Drama/Theatre, Resistance (Social), Social Activism, Performance, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Political theatre, Democracy, Cultural Anthropology, Hegemony, Theatre, Radical Democracy, and Activism
Das europäische Theater im 20. Jahrhundert hat die Bühnen der Welt sozial und politisch geprägt wie kaum ein anderes vor ihm. Jerzy Gro- towski und Eugenio Barba inspirierten den performativen Aktivismus in Latein- und Nordamerika sowie... more
Das europäische Theater im 20. Jahrhundert hat die Bühnen der Welt sozial und politisch geprägt wie kaum ein anderes vor ihm. Jerzy Gro- towski und Eugenio Barba inspirierten den performativen Aktivismus in Latein- und Nordamerika sowie in Asien und Europa. In Frankreich be- gründete Jean Vilar das Festival von Avignon als Ereignis für eine parti- zipierende Öffentlichkeit und erschuf das Théâtre National Populaire als einen Ort der Arbeiterkultur und der ‚Kulturlosen‘. Dario Fo und Franca Rame dachten sich in Italien die Commedia dell’arte als Form des moder- nen politischen Sarkasmus aus, die sie dem Spiel aus Machtkampf und Desillusionierung des 20. Jahrhunderts entgegensetzten.
Wohl kaum ein anderes deutsches Theater jedoch hat so viel innovative Veränderungen auf internationaler Ebene initiiert und beispiellos neues ur- und zugleich undeutsches Theater aufgeführt wie das Theater an der Ruhr – 1980 gegründet von dem italienischen Émigré und promovierten Hegel- Scholaren aus Mailand, Roberto Ciulli. Gemeinsam mit dem – ebenfalls über die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus an die Bühne gekommenen – Kölner Dramaturgen Helmut Schäfer und dem Bühnenbildner Gralf- Edzard Habben erfanden die drei Künstler nicht nur einen Ort, der die deutsche philosophische Tradition der Kritik an der rationalistischen euro- päischen Aufklärung mit der Komik der italienischen Satire in einer post- dramatischen Ästhetik verbindet. Sie setzten eine entschlackte wirtschaft- liche und bürokratische Alternative zum nekrotischen Stadttheaterbetrieb um. Besonders hervorzuheben jedoch ist ihr unpatriotisches Konzept des Reisens und des transeuropäischen, internationalen Theateraustausches, das in den folgenden 30 Jahren zu den Kooperationen zwischen dem Theater an der Ruhr und den Theaterlandschaften Jugoslawiens, Irans, Iraks und der Türkei geführt hat.
Wohl kaum ein anderes deutsches Theater jedoch hat so viel innovative Veränderungen auf internationaler Ebene initiiert und beispiellos neues ur- und zugleich undeutsches Theater aufgeführt wie das Theater an der Ruhr – 1980 gegründet von dem italienischen Émigré und promovierten Hegel- Scholaren aus Mailand, Roberto Ciulli. Gemeinsam mit dem – ebenfalls über die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus an die Bühne gekommenen – Kölner Dramaturgen Helmut Schäfer und dem Bühnenbildner Gralf- Edzard Habben erfanden die drei Künstler nicht nur einen Ort, der die deutsche philosophische Tradition der Kritik an der rationalistischen euro- päischen Aufklärung mit der Komik der italienischen Satire in einer post- dramatischen Ästhetik verbindet. Sie setzten eine entschlackte wirtschaft- liche und bürokratische Alternative zum nekrotischen Stadttheaterbetrieb um. Besonders hervorzuheben jedoch ist ihr unpatriotisches Konzept des Reisens und des transeuropäischen, internationalen Theateraustausches, das in den folgenden 30 Jahren zu den Kooperationen zwischen dem Theater an der Ruhr und den Theaterlandschaften Jugoslawiens, Irans, Iraks und der Türkei geführt hat.
Research Interests: German Studies, Visual Studies, Visual Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Theatre History, and 17 moreGerman History, Performance Studies, Historiography, Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Performance, Theater and film, Avant-Garde Theater, Performance, Historiography (in Art History), German Theatre, Pina Bausch, Drama, Performance, History of Theatre, Theater and Performance Studies, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, Deutsche Geschichte, Theater, and History of the Theater
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Il palazzo dell dubbio. Art e Dossier. Number 390 (September 2021): 38–43.
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Anthropological fieldwork is a collaborative practice, based and reliant on interactions and relations of trust and exchange. Yet, it is limited and enabled by the openings and closings, the stability and instability of relations between... more
Anthropological fieldwork is a collaborative practice, based and reliant on interactions and relations of trust and exchange. Yet, it is limited and enabled by the openings and closings, the stability and instability of relations between interlocutors, fieldworkers, and the many things that matter in-between and around these relations. This article reflects on a series of public conversations called gallery reflections, which were instigated as a collabora-tive ethnographic practice with and within the gallery of the institute of international cultural relations (ifa) in Berlin-Mitte. The series addressed the legacies of German colonial heritage and the public role of anthropology against the backdrop of the construction of the Hum-boldt Forum and museum transformations. Investigating the notion of the anthropologist as sparring partner, this article probes into possible ways of conceiving curatorial-ethnographic collaborations as ›instigative public fieldwork‹.
Tinius, J. (2021): The Anthropologist as Sparring Partner: Instigative Public Fieldwork, Curatorial Collaboration, and German Colonial Heritage. Berliner Blätter 83, 65−85.
Tinius, J. (2021): The Anthropologist as Sparring Partner: Instigative Public Fieldwork, Curatorial Collaboration, and German Colonial Heritage. Berliner Blätter 83, 65−85.
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«Torniamo a casa». Con queste parole, l'attivista congolese e panafricano Mwazulu Dyabanza accompagna attraverso le gallerie del Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac di Parigi un palo funerario in legno del XIX secolo, espropriato dal Ciad... more
«Torniamo a casa». Con queste parole, l'attivista congolese e panafricano Mwazulu Dyabanza accompagna attraverso le gallerie del Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac di Parigi un palo funerario in legno del XIX secolo, espropriato dal Ciad durante il periodo coloniale francese. Diyabanza estrae il palo dalla struttura che lo sorregge, si fa filmare e proteggere da compagni vestiti con abiti che ricordano i guerrieri del film Black Panther. Live sui social media, mentre si aggrappa saldamente con le mani al ma-nufatto e ignora le grida delle guardie, guarda nella telecamera e ribadisce il senso della sua azione: «Sono venuto a recuperare questo manufatto in nome dell'unità e della dignità […]. Torniamo a casa, e non dobbiamo chiedere permesso a chi è ladro».
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Prompted by recurring nationalist appropriations of the term Heimat and its enduring colonial connotations in the German context, we felt the urge to reopen the notion, to trouble it collectively, to shift its meaning beyond singular... more
Prompted by recurring nationalist appropriations of the term Heimat and its enduring colonial connotations in the German context, we felt the urge to reopen the notion, to trouble it collectively, to shift its meaning beyond singular interpretations. Beyond Heimat, in this case: PostHeimat, does not mean abandoning the possibility of connecting to the term, but going through it, across it, and to find other and new meanings that signal a pluralistic re-appropriation of the notion. PostHeimat, then, is a departure point to reflect on concepts like identity-formation, nation, racism, and colonialism, and to move to an understanding of home that is non-discriminatory , does not equate nation with ethnicity or language, and deeply recognises a post-migrant social theory. PostHeimat becoming points towards an emergent and as of yet incomplete idea. It stands for a heterogeneous process that resists forming a new canon, a new Leitkultur. PostHeimat proposes itself more as a conversation, one that does not shy away from admitting less uttered experiences. In doing so, it seeks to form part of a critical social imagination, a new ethics for a diverse commons.
This statement was drafted by the research group of the PostHeimat network during and after Encounter #04 at the Maxim Gorki Theater in March 2020.
https://www.postheimat.com/research-en/
This statement was drafted by the research group of the PostHeimat network during and after Encounter #04 at the Maxim Gorki Theater in March 2020.
https://www.postheimat.com/research-en/
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Reflecting on two sets of analytical trajectories of the articles in this special issue — ‘institutions, histories, and spheres of valuation’ (Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild) and ‘immersion, correspondence, and form’ (Alex Flynn/Lucy... more
Reflecting on two sets of analytical trajectories of the articles in this special issue — ‘institutions, histories, and spheres of valuation’ (Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild) and ‘immersion, correspondence, and form’ (Alex Flynn/Lucy Bell and Paolo Favero) —, I argue for an attuned anthropology of the contemporary. This latter focuses on the tensions of art and aesthetics across scales of glocality, and might benefit from what I would like to call an anachronistic and anatopical positionality and approach. I thus consider us in a trans-anthropological phase, in which anthropology no longer documents, but constitutes these fields itself. This affords a greater reflexivity about the collaborative modalities and theoretical value generated through our scholarship as anthropologists; it also asks for a recalibrated ethnographic awareness of the co-articulation of art and anthropology at all scales of their encounter.
À partir des deux approches analytiques des articles ici présentés— « institutions, histories, et sphères de production de valeurs » (Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild), ainsi qu’ « immersion, correspondance, et forme » (Alex Flynn/Lucy Bell et Paolo Favero) —, j’argumente dans cet épilogue pour une anthropologie de la contemporanéité réceptive. Celle-ci se formerait sur la base des tensions entre art et esthétique à travers différentes échelles de glocalité, et bénéficierait d’une approche anachronique et « anatopical ». Je conçois donc une période trans- anthropologique, dans laquelle l’anthropologie ne s’achève plus dans la documentation, mais constitue elle-même ces champs. Ceci requiert une réflexivité avancée à propos des modalités collaboratives et de la valeur théorique qui sont produites dans au cours de la recherche anthropologique ; ceci demande aussi une conscience ethnographique qui est re-calibrée sur les articulations entre art et anthropologie à tous les niveaux de leur rencontre.
À partir des deux approches analytiques des articles ici présentés— « institutions, histories, et sphères de production de valeurs » (Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild), ainsi qu’ « immersion, correspondance, et forme » (Alex Flynn/Lucy Bell et Paolo Favero) —, j’argumente dans cet épilogue pour une anthropologie de la contemporanéité réceptive. Celle-ci se formerait sur la base des tensions entre art et esthétique à travers différentes échelles de glocalité, et bénéficierait d’une approche anachronique et « anatopical ». Je conçois donc une période trans- anthropologique, dans laquelle l’anthropologie ne s’achève plus dans la documentation, mais constitue elle-même ces champs. Ceci requiert une réflexivité avancée à propos des modalités collaboratives et de la valeur théorique qui sont produites dans au cours de la recherche anthropologique ; ceci demande aussi une conscience ethnographique qui est re-calibrée sur les articulations entre art et anthropologie à tous les niveaux de leur rencontre.
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The departure for this publication and the conversation on which it is based is a series of public encounters that I conceived and curated at the gallery of the institute for foreign cultural relations (ifa) in Berlin in 2017 and 2018.... more
The departure for this publication and the conversation on which it is based is a series of public encounters that I conceived and curated at the gallery of the institute for foreign cultural relations (ifa) in Berlin in 2017 and 2018. [1] Entitled ‘Gallery Reflections’, these encounters took place in between each of the four chapters, or exhibitions, that constituted curator and director Alya Sebti’s long-term programme ‘Untie to tie: On Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Societies’, which inaugurated the discursive and political reorientation of the institution under her guidance. The series was originally conceived as a form of critical collaboration between an anthropologist (Jonas Tinius) and a curator (Alya Sebti), which formed part of a bigger research project based at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) and funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Seating the white anthropologist as a marked sparring partner amidst artists, curators, activists and scholars, we sought to think about ethnographic research as a form of instigation of situations; an interlocutor rather than an observer or audience member, and thus unable to withdraw from critique and debate. [2] The series soon served a broader interest, however, which, borrowing from the metaphor of a reflection, tried to refract, break and divert both our and a wider public’s perspective onto curatorial engagements with colonial legacies and contemporary art today.
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Capacity for character: fiction, ethics and the anthropology of conduct Method acting is one of the most popular theatrical rehearsal systems, according to which actors seek intense identification with characters. In this article, I draw... more
Capacity for character: fiction, ethics and the anthropology of conduct Method acting is one of the most popular theatrical rehearsal systems, according to which actors seek intense identification with characters. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with a professional contemporary German theatre to suggest an alternative view. Rather than training to merge with characters, actors understand characters as a 'repertoire of fiction' they freely draw upon to compose themselves. Training for characters thus facilitates the capacity to detach and appropriate traits of different, imagined and real, persons. It is thus an active and reflected stance that minds the gap between actor and character, rather than a passive and predominantly embodied taking on by actors of fictional characters and their traits. Informed by discussions on the notion of conduct in the anthropology of ethics, this article investigates how training the 'capacity for character' can inform anthropological understandings of detachment, reflexivity and personhood.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Ethics, Theatre Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, and 12 morePerformance, Michel Foucault, Sociology of Ethics and Morality, Bertolt Brecht, Defamiliarization (Distancing) Effect of Bertolt Brecht, Theatre, Anthropology of ethics and morality, Brecht, Method Acting, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, Anthropology of dance and performance, and Self cultivation
This article discusses a central tenet of anthropological approaches to ethics, namely the notion of conduct. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary German theatre professionals, this article highlights how actors and... more
This article discusses a central tenet of anthropological approaches to ethics, namely the notion of conduct. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary German theatre professionals, this article highlights how actors and directors within a public theatre institution cultivate artistic forms of conduct through the practice of the rehearsal. It analyses how rehearsals emerge as both spaces and practices of self-conduct, building on what actors refer to as Haltung – a term that simultaneously denotes attitude, posture, and conduct. Rehearsals facilitate a collective locus and modus of reflected action, suffused with the authority of the director, but ultimately aimed at training actors' capacity to make ethical and aesthetic choices. The aim of this discussion is to show how emic artistic concepts and practices may refine existing and open up new pathways for dialogue between the ethnographic study of art and the anthropology of ethics.
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Aesthetics, Ethics, Theatre Studies, and 13 moreTheatre History, Virtue Ethics, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Anthropology Of Art, Rehearsal studies, German Theatre, Theatre, Anthropology of ethics and morality, German/Austrian/Swiss Drama and Theatre, Anthropology of Ethics, Rehearsal, and The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre
Gallery reflections is a series of public discussions on art, institutions, and curatorial practices convened by anthropologist Jonas Tinius. The encounters take place in the ifa-gallery Berlin once per chapter, crisscrossing the overall... more
Gallery reflections is a series of public discussions on art, institutions, and curatorial practices convened by anthropologist Jonas Tinius. The encounters take place in the ifa-gallery Berlin once per chapter, crisscrossing the overall themes and decentring the focal points of the one year programme ‘Untie to tie: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Societies’ (2017-2018) curated by the gallery’s director Alya Sebti. This second column in the series reflects on how traces, legacies, and futures - as concepts and as practices - allow us to think about the relation between anthropology, art, and temporality.
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Imagine yourself wrapped in darkness, losing your sense of orientation, while flickers of light refracted through an architecture of glass and the sound of disembodied voices guide you through a story of myth, archetype, and loss. The... more
Imagine yourself wrapped in darkness, losing your sense of orientation, while flickers of light refracted through an architecture of glass and the sound of disembodied voices guide you through a story of myth, archetype, and loss. The theatre of glowing darkness is one section of artist Kirstine Roepstorff’s project for the Danish Pavilion at the 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, but it extends further, into the deconstructed site of the neoclassical 1930s gallery and 1960s extensions by Peter Koch. Roepstorff has reconceived and reconstructed these spaces as loci of regeneration, replete with soil, plants, and woven tapestry. The pavilion itself is part of a broader project called influenza, for which the artist has assembled—in a manner mirroring the viral transmission of its subject—a learning network and consortium of creative practitioners, including curator Solvej Helweg Ovesen.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Architecture, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, and 12 moreCurating, Sculpture, Biennales, Denmark, Darkness, Venice Biennale, Danish art, Curating contemporary art, Curating As Critical Practice, Venice Biennial, Museums and Curating, and anthropology of curating
Gallery reflections is a series of public discussions on art, institutions, and curatorial practices convened by anthropologist Jonas Tinius. The encounters take place in the ifa-gallery Berlin once per chapter, crisscrossing the overall... more
Gallery reflections is a series of public discussions on art, institutions, and curatorial practices convened by anthropologist Jonas Tinius. The encounters take place in the ifa-gallery Berlin once per chapter, crisscrossing the overall themes and decentring the focal points of the one year programme ‘Untie to tie: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Societies’ (2017-2018) curated by the gallery’s director Alya Sebti. In this first column and introduction to the series, Jonas Tinius writes about the role of discourse and conversation, reflection and listening, in rethinking a possible dialogue between anthropology, curatorial practice, and contemporary artistic work with decolonial perspectives.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 12 moreCollaboration, Anthropology Of Art, Curating, Postcolonial Theory, Curatorial Studies and Practice, Curatorial Practice (Art), Berlin, Decolonial Thought, Decolonization, Art History, Exhibition History, Museum and Curating Studies, Curating contemporary art, and Critical Museology
Introduction to the special issue "Micro-utopias: anthropological perspectives on art, relationality, and creativity". Published in Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia 5, issue 1. Open Access and Free to Download: https://cadernosaa.revues.org
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The editors began discussing this special issue in 2014 through a serendipitous encounter. Ruy and Maïté were interested in the possibility of promoting an anthropology of utopia, and simultaneously an anthropology as utopia. Alex and... more
The editors began discussing this special issue in 2014 through a serendipitous encounter. Ruy and Maïté were interested in the possibility of promoting an anthropology of utopia, and simultaneously an anthropology as utopia. Alex and Jonas, working on anthropological ap- proaches to contemporary artistic practices, were seeking to develop the theorising potential of relational art. e immanent space of connection was, precisely, the concept of “micro-utopia”. In our discussions, several questions, problems, and challenges emerged about the relevance of micro-utopias for an anthropology of art in particular, but also for an anthropological agenda concerned with core themes of the disciplines, among them agency, creativity, and relationality.
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On Berlin’s Museum Island, a controversial architectural monument is in the process of completion: the reconstruction of the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), now renamed the “Humboldt Forum”. The project, which encapsulates the... more
On Berlin’s Museum Island, a controversial architectural monument is in the process of completion: the reconstruction of the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), now renamed the “Humboldt Forum”. The project, which encapsulates the city’s vexed relationship with its social, cultural and political heritage, also has much to tell us about the way Berlin — and Germany — sees itself in post-socialist Europe.
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Architecture, Museum Studies, and 24 moreSocial and Cultural Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, Utopian Studies, Urban Planning, Postsocialism, Cosmopolitanism, History of Museums, Architectural History, Urban Studies, Anthropology Of Art, Cosmopolitan Urbanism, Museums and Exhibition Design, Urban Sociology, Socialism, GDR History, Anthropology of Architecture, Berlin, History of architecture, Museum and Heritage Studies, East Germany, Anthropology of Socialism and Postsocialism, Humboldt-Forum, Palast der Republik, and Architecture and Public Spaces
This article responds to Nicolas Bourriaud's account of the poetic function of relational art, which for him " consists in reforming worlds of subjectivization " (2002 [1998]: 104). I challenge and complement his account of how such... more
This article responds to Nicolas Bourriaud's account of the poetic function of relational art, which for him " consists in reforming worlds of subjectivization " (2002 [1998]: 104). I challenge and complement his account of how such reforming takes place in relational art by providing an ethnographic description of what I term 'dialectical fiction'. This notion describes actors' cultivation of detachment and reappropriation of subjectivity during theatre rehearsals by building up fictional characters. The ethnographic source for this analysis is a long-term study of the rehearsal processes for a site-specific and participatory refugee theatre and art project in an abandoned post-industrial refugee camp in the German Ruhr valley. By inviting refugee actors to introduce abstract and fictitious characters into their reflections on acting and cultivation of an acting conduct, this project aspired to what its director called theatre's "impossible political utopia": a situation in which refugees are not framed as vulnerable victims "acting themselves", but as creative agents capable of playfully negotiating their political subjectivities.
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Refugee Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 12 moreAnthropology of Performance, Migration, Anthropology Of Art, Migration Studies, Rehearsal studies, Bertolt Brecht, Dialectic, Cultural Anthropology, German Theatre, Rehearsal, Theater and Performance Studies, and The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre
My review of Bernd Stegemann's latest book on realism, theatre, and capitalism has just appeared in the latest issue of Theatre Research International (Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 86-87). Stegemann takes ‘realism’ to be ‘the aesthetic... more
My review of Bernd Stegemann's latest book on realism, theatre, and capitalism has just appeared in the latest issue of Theatre Research International (Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 86-87).
Stegemann takes ‘realism’ to be ‘the aesthetic method through which we can cope with an increasingly contradictory world’ (p. 11). This builds on two assumptions arguably shared by all artistic realisms. First, ‘there is a reality and we can try to understand it’, and second, there exist forms of realistic portrayal which help ‘grasp the world as variable and modifiable’, thus freeing people from ‘painfully tolerating their lives as an incomprehensible string of chanceful events’ (p. 8).
Stegemann takes ‘realism’ to be ‘the aesthetic method through which we can cope with an increasingly contradictory world’ (p. 11). This builds on two assumptions arguably shared by all artistic realisms. First, ‘there is a reality and we can try to understand it’, and second, there exist forms of realistic portrayal which help ‘grasp the world as variable and modifiable’, thus freeing people from ‘painfully tolerating their lives as an incomprehensible string of chanceful events’ (p. 8).
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22 (1): 215–216
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12346/abstract?campaign=woletoc
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12346/abstract?campaign=woletoc
Research Interests: Anthropology, Art History, Social Anthropology, Art, Social Sciences, and 15 moreArt Theory, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Modern Art, Surrealism, Gift Exchange, Anthropology Of Art, History of Art, Cultural Anthropology, Marilyn Strathern, Marcel Mauss, Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational aesthetics, Participatory and Relational Arts, and Anthropology of Arts
Definitions of ‘performance’ abound. Some of the principal reasons for anthropologists’ continued interest in the subject of performance are the reflexive, relational, and embodied dimensions of performance. Performance is a prism for... more
Definitions of ‘performance’ abound. Some of the principal reasons for anthropologists’ continued interest in the subject of performance are the reflexive, relational, and embodied dimensions of performance. Performance is a prism for studying human life.
This thematic thread offers to expand our perspective by providing a view into practices of rehearsing, probing, improvising, scores, scripts, choreographies, backstage, frontstage, emergences, entries and exits, frames and scenes. These new anthropological approaches to performance present more than a collection of accounts on one tradition of playful enactment or another.
http://allegralaboratory.net/new-anthropologies-of-political-performance-thematic-thread-on-performance-2/
This thematic thread offers to expand our perspective by providing a view into practices of rehearsing, probing, improvising, scores, scripts, choreographies, backstage, frontstage, emergences, entries and exits, frames and scenes. These new anthropological approaches to performance present more than a collection of accounts on one tradition of playful enactment or another.
http://allegralaboratory.net/new-anthropologies-of-political-performance-thematic-thread-on-performance-2/
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If institutions are "the more enduring features of social life" (Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 1984), then how do they come into being? What kinds of collective practices and intersubjective aspirations bring them about, and how... more
If institutions are "the more enduring features of social life" (Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 1984), then how do they come into being? What kinds of collective practices and intersubjective aspirations bring them about, and how do they maintain them? This article investigates these questions through the lens of instituting processes, that is, practices that structure and underpin institutional formations. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Theater an der Ruhr, a public theatre in the German post-industrial Ruhr valley, this article examines the role of rehearsals as a key instituting practice in theatres. In this case study, the ideals and actions associated with long-term rehearsals serve not merely a professional purpose as principal form of artistic labour; rather, rehearsals constitute the aesthetic, ethical, and political modus operandi of the institution. As the core work of art in the institution, rehearsals facilitate the long-term development of a collective aesthetic in an ensemble as well as the ethical cultivation of actors' artistic sensibilities. This article thereby also examines how the theatre conceptualises collective rehearsing as a political practice by distinguishing it from the project-based and flexible modalities propagated by post-Fordist policies in the arts. Artistic critique is articulated through and not against the formation of an institution. Based on this account, this article proposes to treat artistic institutions and instituting processes as significant subjects of anthropological research and as prisms for the study of aesthetic, ethical, and political practices.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13528165.2015.1071041
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13528165.2015.1071041
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Social Anthropology, and 27 moreSociology of Work, Theatre History, German History, Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Performance Art, Institutional Theory, Institutional Change, Avant-Garde Theater, Anthropology Of Art, Sociology of Organizations, Performance, Sociology of Arts, Labour Studies, Work and Labour, Anthropology of Organizations, Cultural Anthropology, German Theatre, Theatre, Germany, Institutions, Fordism and Post-Fordism, Luc Boltanski, Theater and Performance Studies, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, Modern European Drama and Theatre, and Sociology of Performing Arts
In 2014, the Louvre and the Tate Modern between them received over 12 million visitors. In November of the same year, Christie’s contemporary art sale raised an astonishing $852.9m. Not only has the widely forecast ‘end of art’ (Belting... more
In 2014, the Louvre and the Tate Modern between them received over 12 million visitors. In November of the same year, Christie’s contemporary art sale raised an astonishing $852.9m. Not only has the widely forecast ‘end of art’ (Belting 1987, Danto 1986, 1995) failed to materialise, but art has increasingly spilled beyond the refined spaces of the Tuileries, the Southbank, and the auction houses for the super-rich. Whether it’s Banksy’s murals being torn off walls by ‘ignorant’ council officials in Clacton-on-Sea, the Occupy movement’s ‘bat signal’ being projected onto the Verizon building in New York, or the launch of Paul McCarthy’s ambiguously sexual Parisian ‘Tree’ sculpture, new forms and engagements with art generate fierce debate in all spheres of social, economic, and political life. Are these controversies still about ideas of beauty? Or has art succumbed to spectacle and money? And what, if any, is the relation of contemporary art to the political?
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Dieser Artikel erscheint in einer Serie von Konversationen mit Teilnehmern des Kunst- und Theaterprojektes RUHRORTER mit Flüchtlingen im Ruhrgebiet. Die Serie erscheint als wöchentliche Kolumne in der Tageszeitung WAZ. This article is... more
Dieser Artikel erscheint in einer Serie von Konversationen mit Teilnehmern des Kunst- und Theaterprojektes RUHRORTER mit Flüchtlingen im Ruhrgebiet. Die Serie erscheint als wöchentliche Kolumne in der Tageszeitung WAZ.
This article is part of a series of conversations with participants of the refugee theatre project RUHRORTER published as a weekly column in the German daily WAZ.
This article is part of a series of conversations with participants of the refugee theatre project RUHRORTER published as a weekly column in the German daily WAZ.
Research Interests:
Dieser Artikel erscheint in einer Serie von Konversationen mit Teilnehmern des Kunst- und Theaterprojektes RUHRORTER mit Flüchtlingen im Ruhrgebiet. Die Serie erscheint als wöchentliche Kolumne in der Tageszeitung WAZ. This article is... more
Dieser Artikel erscheint in einer Serie von Konversationen mit Teilnehmern des Kunst- und Theaterprojektes RUHRORTER mit Flüchtlingen im Ruhrgebiet. Die Serie erscheint als wöchentliche Kolumne in der Tageszeitung WAZ.
This article is part of a series of conversations with participants of the refugee theatre project RUHRORTER published as a weekly column in the German daily WAZ.
This article is part of a series of conversations with participants of the refugee theatre project RUHRORTER published as a weekly column in the German daily WAZ.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud (2002 [1998]: 13) proposed the concept of “microtopias” (PT micro- -utopias, FR micro-utopies), a call to engage with art practices as collective, relational, contextualised endeavours, foregrounding the... more
In 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud (2002 [1998]: 13) proposed the concept of “microtopias” (PT micro- -utopias, FR micro-utopies), a call to engage with art practices as collective, relational, contextualised endeavours, foregrounding the concrete inter-relations among artists and agents that inform artistic production. This proposal was later subject to critique by Claire Bishop (2004), who noted the ab- sence of plurality and politicised context in her seminal discussion of what has become known as ‘relational aesthetics’. Bishop argued that these art practices did not produce democratic relations but instead built on mechanisms of exclusion that didn’t address the antagonism and inequality in the process of art production pertinent to “the divided and incomplete subject of today” (2004: 79). Re- cently, Roger Sansi-Roca has addressed this debate in his book Art, Anthropology and the Gift (2014), seeing the artist as an active bricoleur, producer of small-scale models as utopian projections of the world, prototypes, experiments that are as political as any other collective movement. Sansi-Roca’s connection of art and anthropology via utopia is an ideal pretext for the outline of this special issue that we advance here, within the wider framework of developing an “anthropology of utopia”, which we see ultimately as a theory of social creativity.
In this special issue we propose to discuss anthropological approaches - ethnographic or theoreti- cal - to human interactions and processes of imagination and creativity. Inspired by the proposals set forth by Bourriaud’s concept of the ‘microtopia’, we challenge colleagues to mobilise an understand- ing of diverse forms of social interactivity as artistic practice whereby processes of interaction are understood as generative, transformational, poïetic microtopias. We thus propose to move beyond the concrete sphere of artistic production, seeing microtopias as part of our morphogenetic élan vital (Bergson 1907), the creativity and improvisation of our unscripted everyday lives (Hallam and In- gold 2008) that is however and necessarily framed as political act produced within historical context (Geuss 2009). Our goal is thus to engage with microtopias as ‘concrete utopias’ (McGuire 2011): examples - from artistic collaborations to architectural configurations, political localisms, economic partnerships, religious community makings, etc. - of the collective elaboration of meaning, temporal redefinition, and new social interstices.
We therefore welcome submissions that explicitly address the concept of microtopia through em- pirical case studies emphasising art, relationality, and/or creativity, such as social movement mobili- sations, spiritual/ethical projects of the self, contemporary art practice, creative processes of labour, instances of community performance, state sponsored cultural politics, architectural projects, urban- ist understandings of revitalisation, etc.
Guest editors:
Ruy Blanes (University of Bergen), Alex Flynn (University of Durham), Maïté Maskens (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Jonas Tinius (University of Cambridge)
Submission guidelines see: http://cadernosaa.revues.org/
Accepted languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French
In this special issue we propose to discuss anthropological approaches - ethnographic or theoreti- cal - to human interactions and processes of imagination and creativity. Inspired by the proposals set forth by Bourriaud’s concept of the ‘microtopia’, we challenge colleagues to mobilise an understand- ing of diverse forms of social interactivity as artistic practice whereby processes of interaction are understood as generative, transformational, poïetic microtopias. We thus propose to move beyond the concrete sphere of artistic production, seeing microtopias as part of our morphogenetic élan vital (Bergson 1907), the creativity and improvisation of our unscripted everyday lives (Hallam and In- gold 2008) that is however and necessarily framed as political act produced within historical context (Geuss 2009). Our goal is thus to engage with microtopias as ‘concrete utopias’ (McGuire 2011): examples - from artistic collaborations to architectural configurations, political localisms, economic partnerships, religious community makings, etc. - of the collective elaboration of meaning, temporal redefinition, and new social interstices.
We therefore welcome submissions that explicitly address the concept of microtopia through em- pirical case studies emphasising art, relationality, and/or creativity, such as social movement mobili- sations, spiritual/ethical projects of the self, contemporary art practice, creative processes of labour, instances of community performance, state sponsored cultural politics, architectural projects, urban- ist understandings of revitalisation, etc.
Guest editors:
Ruy Blanes (University of Bergen), Alex Flynn (University of Durham), Maïté Maskens (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Jonas Tinius (University of Cambridge)
Submission guidelines see: http://cadernosaa.revues.org/
Accepted languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French
Research Interests:
This report from the recent EASA 2014 conference in Tallinn on ‘Collaboration, intimacy and revolution’ takes a look at one particular of its manifold threads: anthropology and art. Key questions such as how many anthro- pologies of art... more
This report from the recent EASA 2014 conference in Tallinn on ‘Collaboration, intimacy and revolution’ takes a look at one particular of its manifold threads: anthropology and
art. Key questions such as how many anthro- pologies of art there actually are, sparked heated debate in panels and on Twitter
alike (re-read some of the happenings via #EASA2014ART).
In this brief report, I review three substantial strands that appeared to unite debates across the nine panels, two films, and one plenary directly addressing art and anthropology: 1. new collaborative practices, 2. contemporary art patronage, and 3. common conceptual paradigms.
art. Key questions such as how many anthro- pologies of art there actually are, sparked heated debate in panels and on Twitter
alike (re-read some of the happenings via #EASA2014ART).
In this brief report, I review three substantial strands that appeared to unite debates across the nine panels, two films, and one plenary directly addressing art and anthropology: 1. new collaborative practices, 2. contemporary art patronage, and 3. common conceptual paradigms.
Research Interests:
Seit einigen Jahren sprechen nicht mehr nur Kulturanthropolog_innen von ihren Informant_innen als Expert_innen des Alltags. Vielmehr ist dieser Begriff zu einem der zentralen Konzepte des Performance-Kollektivs Rimini Protokoll geworden.... more
Seit einigen Jahren sprechen nicht mehr nur Kulturanthropolog_innen von ihren Informant_innen als Expert_innen des Alltags. Vielmehr ist dieser Begriff zu einem der zentralen Konzepte des Performance-Kollektivs Rimini Protokoll geworden. Die Gruppe spielt etwa in ihrer Installation Situation Rooms mit der Spannung zwischen einer Form von Rollenspiel und dokumentarischem Hyperrealismus, der an teilnehmende Beobachtung erinnert. Auf ähnliche Art und Weise, allerdings von einer kulturanthropologischen Perspektive ausgehend, versteht die anglo-russische Bewegung ethnographic conceptualism Konzeptkunst als eine Form der Ethnografie.
Beide Gruppen, so lautet die These dieses Artikels, beschreiben und entwickeln Methoden und Praktiken, die die epistemologischen und methodologischen Grenzen zwischen Kunst und Anthropologie bewusst verwischen. Sie bearbeiten und erforschen das Spielfeld zwischen ethnografischer Praxis und performativer Kunst. In diesem Prozess entstehen neue Fragestellungen, die das Selbstverständnis beider Praktiken an ihren bewegten Rändern untersuchen. Auf welche tradierten disziplinären Grenzziehungen reagieren diese Gruppen? Welche produktiven und komplexen Dilemmata entstehen bei der Erforschung künstlerischer Forschung? Wie stellen wir als Künstler_innen oder als Anthropolog_innen erworbenes ästhetisches, ethisches oder künstlerisches Wissen dar, beziehungsweise wie versinnlichen wir das Schriftliche, wie verschriftlichen wir das Sinnliche?
Im Dialog mit Chris Rutten u.a. (2013) und Fiona Siegenthaler (2013) diskutiert dieser Artikel die Beziehung zwischen ethnografischer Kunst und Kunst-als-Ethnografie anhand der performativen Kunstinstallation Situation Room des Performance-Kollektivs Rimini Protokoll und der theoretischen Überlegungen der Bewegung ethnographic conceptualism. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, den Blick auf die Problematiken und Denkanstöße des ethnografischen Forschens in der Kunst und des performativen Reflektierens in der Anthropologie zu schärfen.
Beide Gruppen, so lautet die These dieses Artikels, beschreiben und entwickeln Methoden und Praktiken, die die epistemologischen und methodologischen Grenzen zwischen Kunst und Anthropologie bewusst verwischen. Sie bearbeiten und erforschen das Spielfeld zwischen ethnografischer Praxis und performativer Kunst. In diesem Prozess entstehen neue Fragestellungen, die das Selbstverständnis beider Praktiken an ihren bewegten Rändern untersuchen. Auf welche tradierten disziplinären Grenzziehungen reagieren diese Gruppen? Welche produktiven und komplexen Dilemmata entstehen bei der Erforschung künstlerischer Forschung? Wie stellen wir als Künstler_innen oder als Anthropolog_innen erworbenes ästhetisches, ethisches oder künstlerisches Wissen dar, beziehungsweise wie versinnlichen wir das Schriftliche, wie verschriftlichen wir das Sinnliche?
Im Dialog mit Chris Rutten u.a. (2013) und Fiona Siegenthaler (2013) diskutiert dieser Artikel die Beziehung zwischen ethnografischer Kunst und Kunst-als-Ethnografie anhand der performativen Kunstinstallation Situation Room des Performance-Kollektivs Rimini Protokoll und der theoretischen Überlegungen der Bewegung ethnographic conceptualism. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, den Blick auf die Problematiken und Denkanstöße des ethnografischen Forschens in der Kunst und des performativen Reflektierens in der Anthropologie zu schärfen.
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Art History, Theatre Studies, Ethnography, and 14 morePerformance Studies, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Theory, Avant-Garde Theater, Anthropology Of Art, Conceptual Art, Cultural Anthropology, German Theatre, Ethnographic Methods, Theatre, Germany, Relational aesthetics, and Theater and Performance Studies
Dieser Artikel erscheint in einer Serie von Konversationen mit Teilnehmern des Kunst- und Theaterprojektes RUHRORTER mit Flüchtlingen im Ruhrgebiet. Die Serie erscheint als wöchentliche Kolumne in der Tageszeitung WAZ. This article is... more
Dieser Artikel erscheint in einer Serie von Konversationen mit Teilnehmern des Kunst- und Theaterprojektes RUHRORTER mit Flüchtlingen im Ruhrgebiet. Die Serie erscheint als wöchentliche Kolumne in der Tageszeitung WAZ.
This article is part of a series of conversations with participants of the refugee theatre project RUHRORTER published as a weekly column in the German daily WAZ.
This article is part of a series of conversations with participants of the refugee theatre project RUHRORTER published as a weekly column in the German daily WAZ.
Research Interests:
Dieser Artikel erscheint in einer Serie von Konversationen mit Teilnehmern des Kunst- und Theaterprojektes RUHRORTER mit Flüchtlingen im Ruhrgebiet. Die Serie erscheint als wöchentliche Kolumne in der Tageszeitung WAZ. This article... more
Dieser Artikel erscheint in einer Serie von Konversationen mit Teilnehmern des Kunst- und Theaterprojektes RUHRORTER mit Flüchtlingen im Ruhrgebiet. Die Serie erscheint als wöchentliche Kolumne in der Tageszeitung WAZ.
This article is part of a series of conversations with participants of the refugee theatre project RUHRORTER published as a weekly column in the German daily WAZ.
This article is part of a series of conversations with participants of the refugee theatre project RUHRORTER published as a weekly column in the German daily WAZ.
Research Interests:
Jonas Tinius and Johannes Lenhard interview anthropologist Matthew Engelke from the London School of Economics in this first piece for the new strand on the ‘Good Life’. Building on earlier research on what it means to be good for a... more
Jonas Tinius and Johannes Lenhard interview anthropologist Matthew Engelke from the London School of Economics in this first piece for the new strand on the ‘Good Life’. Building on earlier research on what it means to be good for a Christian, Engelke talks about achieving a good life and happiness as a secular humanist in Britain today. In short, such a good life emerges through debate, contemplation, reason and argument – always in relation and conversation with others – and it comes now, in this world, as part of this life’s happiness. Engelke provides us with starting points to explore important questions about wellbeing, ethics, and a good life – without god.
Research Interests: Religion, Christianity, Comparative Religion, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, and 13 moreEthics, Social Anthropology, Secular Humanism, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Christianity, Secularization, Politics of Secularism, Humanism, Secularisms and Secularities, Anthropology of ethics and morality, Religious Studies, Secularism, and Anthropology of Religion
Das Projekt RUHRORTER verband Theater, Installation und Intervention im öffentlichen Raum zugleich. Das Ziel von RUHRORTER war die Suche nach neuen ästhetischen Formen, um mit den Mitteln der Kunst und der forschenden Dokumentation ein... more
Das Projekt RUHRORTER verband Theater, Installation und Intervention im öffentlichen Raum zugleich. Das Ziel von RUHRORTER war die Suche nach neuen ästhetischen Formen, um mit den Mitteln der Kunst und der forschenden Dokumentation ein öffentlich sichtbares und erfahrbares Korrektiv gegen die stereotype Kategorisierung und Ausgrenzung von Flüchtlingen - sowohl in der Bürgergesellschaft, als auch in den Medien und der dokumentarischen Kunst - zu entwerfen.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Whether we are studying artists in illicit urban settings in Spain, popular democratic practices in rural provinces in India, or the privatisation of public housing and public spaces in London, our field sites are permeated by practices... more
Whether we are studying artists in illicit urban settings in Spain, popular democratic practices in rural provinces in India, or the privatisation of public housing and public spaces in London, our field sites are permeated by practices of framing and staging. While the practices implied by the concepts ‘framing’ and ‘staging’ can thus serve as powerful metaphor to describe both, the most intimate presentation of self and the categorisation of a large groups of people, they also raise further questions: In what ways does the theatrical imagery of a stage or the visual image of a frame help us overcome misleading dichotomies such as performance and reality, presentation and essence, rhetoric and communication? How can we conceptualise framing and staging both as political instruments for influencing, say, public opinion and as the very essential practice for constituting sociality or subjectivity?
Research Interests: Sociology, Anthropology, Art History, Visual Anthropology, Social Anthropology, and 18 morePerformance Studies, Contemporary Art, Shakespeare, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Jurgen Habermas, Performance Art, Urban Studies, Performance, Public Sphere, Urban Sociology, Street Art, Cultural Anthropology, Interdisciplinary Studies, Interdisciplinary research (Social Sciences), Spain, India, Hamlet, and Architecture and Public Spaces
Gespräch im Vorfeld des Arbeitstreffens 1 organisiert vom Cobratheater Netzwerk, Fundus Theater, Hamburg
Research Interests: Organizational Behavior, German Studies, Anthropology, Art History, Theatre Studies, and 12 moreCultural Sociology, German History, Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Politics, Anthropology Of Art, Sociology of Arts, Sociology of Art, Work and Labour, Postfordism, Soziologie, and Arbeitssoziologie
Theatre, it could be argued, involves three major concerns: warning (criticism), representation (mimesis), and collective aesthetic imagination (aisthesis/poïesis). While the first instrumentalises theatre, and the second underestimates... more
Theatre, it could be argued, involves three major concerns: warning (criticism), representation (mimesis), and collective aesthetic imagination (aisthesis/poïesis). While the first instrumentalises theatre, and the second underestimates its possibilities, it is primarily the third that sets it apart from ‘Science’ and ‘Politics’. Or is it?
Research Interests: Environmental Science, Anthropology, Philosophy of Science, Theatre Studies, Climate Change, and 11 moreActor Network Theory, Climate Change Adaptation, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Social Representations, Anthropology of Performance, Climate change policy, History of Science, Environmental Sustainability, Bruno Latour, Actor-Network-Theory, and Theatre
Research Interests:
Angekündigt wurde er beim dritten Branchentreff des Berliner Performing Arts Programm (PAP) im Oktober als ‚Nachwuchsstar der Anthropologie‘: Jonas Tinius, Jahrgang 1989, studierte Sozialanthropologie, Anglistik und Amerikanis- tik in... more
Angekündigt wurde er beim dritten Branchentreff des Berliner Performing Arts Programm (PAP) im Oktober als ‚Nachwuchsstar der Anthropologie‘: Jonas Tinius, Jahrgang 1989, studierte Sozialanthropologie, Anglistik und Amerikanis- tik in Münster und Cambridge und promoviert in Cambridge darüber, wie sich in einer Theaterinstitution die Felder Kunst, Politik und Ethik überschneiden. Für seine Dissertation begleite- te Tinius am Theater an der Ruhr über 15 Mona- te lang ein Theaterprojekt mit Geflüchteten, die Ruhrorter. Darüber hinaus widmet er sich for- schend der freien Szene, der post-fordistischen (künstlerischen) Arbeit sowie der Frage, wie Theater im deutschen Bildungszusammenhang seit dem 19. Jahrhundert auf die Selbstkultivierung wirkt. Gemeinsam mit seinem Kollegen Alex Flynn gründete Jonas Tinius das Anthropologies of Art Network [A/A]. Sein Arbeitsort ist nicht der Elfenbeinturm: Er bezeichnet anthropolo- gische Forschung mit Clifford Geertz als “deep hanging out”; die Premierenfeier und das Kol- legengespräch gehören ebenso dazu wie wis- senschaftliche Dokumentation, Artikel oder Konferenzbeiträge. Tinius ist aktiv auf Twitter, Facebook und umtriebig in der Szene – Julian Kamphausen, der ihn zum PAP-Branchentreff eingeladen hat, nennt ihn einen „hyperrezeptiven Multimenschen“. In einem unstrukturier- ten Gespräch am Rande des Geschehens im Auf- bauhaus befragten wir den Kulturanthropologen erwartungsvoll zu neuen Erkenntnissen aus sei- ner wissenschaftlichen Arbeit.
Research Interests: German Studies, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Dance Studies, Research Methodology, and 11 morePerformance Studies, Refugee Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Migration, Theater and film, Avant-Garde Theater, Refugees, Germany, Theater and Performance Studies, and The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre
Research Interests:
Adorno’s reflexions on aesthetics have become a source of much inspiration across the human sciences and art in the 20th century. Yet, despite the mark his work has left on many practitioners in the field of theatre studies, no work until... more
Adorno’s reflexions on aesthetics have become a source of much inspiration across the human sciences and art in the 20th century. Yet, despite the mark his work has left on many practitioners in the field of theatre studies, no work until this point has dedicated a thorough analysis to the ways in which Adorno’s writings on aesthetics pertain specifically to theatre or the theatrical. Anja Nowak has provided a convincingly meticulous and yet brief and accessible remedy for this lacuna. She sets out to investigate what elements of an aesthetic of the theatrical can be found in Adorno’s writings, taking his unfinished Aesthetic Theory (AT) as a starting point but venturing far beyond. Nowak stresses that references to theatre or the theatrical in these writings do not amount to an explicit theory, but that they constitute fragments, elements, Bruchstücke, much like the philosophy propounded in AT. This work sets out to show in what ways these are relevant for theatre studies, artists, and scholars interested in a social and processual aesthetics of theatre and art.
Research Interests:
‚Erscheinung’ und ‚Ereignis’ gehören zu jenen Begriffen, die Anthropologie, Kunstgeschichte und Philosophie in intensiven Diskussionen vereint haben, aber auch polarisieren. Sie beschreiben Phänomene, die kaum greifbar scheinen und doch... more
‚Erscheinung’ und ‚Ereignis’ gehören zu jenen Begriffen, die Anthropologie, Kunstgeschichte und Philosophie in intensiven Diskussionen vereint haben, aber auch polarisieren. Sie beschreiben Phänomene, die kaum greifbar scheinen und doch nicht besser die Rupturen und Veränderungen von ethisch-ästhetischer Wahrnehmung beschreiben könnten, die wichtige Aspekte dieser Disziplinen tangieren. Auch die Geschichts- und Theaterwissenschaften haben diesen Begriffen aus verständlichen Gründen nicht erst in der letzten Dekade besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt (vgl. Fischer-Lichte et al. 2003, Yurchak 2005).
Research Interests:
Driven by my observations about how the project’s participants dealt with several other Romani participants’ deportations during production phases, this post explores how the art project reflected on the actors’ ‘precarious... more
Driven by my observations about how the project’s participants dealt with several other Romani participants’ deportations during production phases, this post explores how the art project reflected on the actors’ ‘precarious temporalities’. What I mean by that is the following: I would like to suggest that for the refugees I worked with during the theatre project, ‘the end of emergency’ was nowhere in sight as long as their official legal status kept them in a state of ‘toleration’ or Duldung in German, a legal term denoting the ‘temporary suspension of deportation’. Many actors in the group subjected to the legal status of Duldung were traumatised by two kinds of extreme events that interlock. One was the usually singular but often life-threatening escape from their home-countries. The second traumatising event, less spectacular yet more continually disconcerting, was the continued unrest created by the constant possibility of being deported. In this way, this post continues a concern raised by Heike Drotbohm and Ines Hasselberg in their earlier post. They write: "Deportation, the forced removal of foreign nationals from a given national territory, is not a singular event. It is a process that begins long before, and carries on long after, the removal from one country to another takes place."
Research Interests:
‘Gurlitt’ has already become a scenario word for one of the most notorious cases of art history after World War II. It concerns the inherited collection of 1,406 art works stored for over thirty years in an apartment in the district of... more
‘Gurlitt’ has already become a scenario word for one of the most notorious cases of art history after World War II. It concerns the inherited collection of 1,406 art works stored for over thirty years in an apartment in the district of Schwabing, formerly student, now wealthy university and museum quarter in Munich. The ‘Gurlitt case’, as Anna Blair traces in her article in this magazine, is a prism for a nexus of hitherto not unrelated but rarely ever so intertwined (art) historical, moral, political, and economic conundrums. Throughout this commentary, I wish to attend to the interlocking of these aspects, casting an anthropological glance at the German cultural historical background to and implications of this case. Key to my discussion is the relation between aesthetic experience and ethic judgement.
Research Interests:
With subsidised arts plunged into crisis, what is at stake for cultural institutions and political actors comes to the fore of debates. This paper explores a range of ways in which the relation between German cultural politics, the notion... more
With subsidised arts plunged into crisis, what is at stake for cultural institutions and political actors comes to the fore of debates. This paper explores a range of ways in which the relation between German cultural politics, the notion of the 'Kulturstaat', art patronage, and the city theatre structures has been problematised. A central recurring question is the moral responsibility of the state to safeguard the arts, feudal heritage, and institutional theatre traditions.
Research Interests:
The poetry of Bertolt Brecht has often been belittled as “the second string on his bow”. For a poet who has published more than a thousand pages of poetry, this is an unsatisfactory description of a poetic corpus and a life story, both of... more
The poetry of Bertolt Brecht has often been belittled as “the second string on his bow”. For a poet who has published more than a thousand pages of poetry, this is an unsatisfactory description of a poetic corpus and a life story, both of which underwent dramatic changes in their engagement with the contemporary political world and its revolutions. Forced into political exile in 1933, first to Scandinavia and then to the USA, Brecht made the decision to return to East Berlin in 1949. Brecht assumed his role as a ‘state poet’ (Staatsdichter) of the German Democratic Republic and its Marxist-Leninist stance with mixed feelings that persisted throughout the 1950s. The two poems ‘In Smolny During the Summer of 1917 the Bolsheviks Discovered Where the People were Represented – in the Kitchen’, and ‘The Carpet Weavers of Kuyan-Bulak Honour Lenin’, published collectively as Stories from the Revolution are insightful, idiosyncratic and profound pieces of political poetry, which challenge romanticised ideas about political revolutions and provide a unique, literary point of view on the Realpolitik of the set of revolutions that occurred in Russia in 1917. His view on the subtle subversion of politics as a space for imaginative resistance, as well as on the failure of revolutions to bring about proper, holistic change can inform our view on what revolution and politics can mean in many of the contexts in which it is evoked. The concept of revolution, much like those of crisis, change, or transformation, is ambiguous, full of imaginary aspirations, and often misleading.
Research Interests:
In this brief essay, I refer to Adorno's perspective on ethical life as proposed in his lectures on moral philosophy and Minima Moralia. I argue closely in line with Geuss' analysis in Outside Ethics that in these and other works, Adorno... more
In this brief essay, I refer to Adorno's perspective on ethical life as proposed in his lectures on moral philosophy and Minima Moralia. I argue closely in line with Geuss' analysis in Outside Ethics that in these and other works, Adorno outlines not merely a 'melancholy science' that points to the damaged from within the damaged life. More so, by inciting an epistemological analysis of what is wrong, cannot be known, and what cannot be done, he constructs a possibility to live and act differently, to think about the unthinkable. One aspect of our lifes, which enables such fugitive moments of thinking the seemingly impossible and living beyond and outside a damaged ethics, are radical forms of art. It is the study of the experience and the creation of (modern) art, which, I suggest, merits methodological and epistemological potential beyond philosphical contemplation by directing us towards innovative critical research into the transformative potential of contemporary art.
Research Interests:
How to conceptualise the field that anthropology encounters in the study of theatre. An essayistic exploration.
Research Interests:
For the Theater an der Ruhr, a 'theatrelandscape' is more than mere recognition of difference; it has brought to the attention of the German and international public the theatre landscapes of a whole nexus of regions, such as Yugoslavia,... more
For the Theater an der Ruhr, a 'theatrelandscape' is more than mere recognition of difference; it has brought to the attention of the German and international public the theatre landscapes of a whole nexus of regions, such as Yugoslavia, the Silk Road, Arabia and North Africa and thereby initiated a dialogue not just between theatrical visions, but different ‘styles of life’, projects of artistic self-formation and social engagement. Their vision of theatrescapes is not only an expansion of the German hermeneutic philosopher H.G. Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons (‘Horizontverschmelzung’, 1960), but also an anthropological quest for the appreciation of difference whilst recognising the commonalities of humankind. Doing so, I seek to point to the enriching implications of theatre for anthropological studies of the way people transform the cultural landscapes they inhabit.
Research Interests:
See http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/performance-network "The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN) brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with... more
See http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/performance-network
"The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN) brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.
Interest in performance reflects a movement away from thinking in terms of immutable objects and singular subjects. It focuses attention on collective contexts. It also models a different way to mean: so performances, theatricality, theatre, and the arts in practice are relevant, too. But the group’s main focus is on the potential of the idea of performance as an umbrella approach to culture: a 'kind of thinking in its own right' (Cull/Minors 2012).
What does it mean to frame, stage, display or enact? In what sense might all forms of self-consciously public statements – art, politics, academic discourse – be seen as performance?
How is our post-print digital era, with its forces of equivalence and convergence, prompting reconsideration of traditional categories and boundaries – ie of the disciplinary itself?
How do we understand objects (fixed, a record) when they cannot exist separate from their experience on the part of somebody or other (time-bound, embodied)?
How do we understand the subject when it depends on imagined and actual collectivities to position itself?
Each session will be organized around two short but very different presentations, followed by a discussion. We hope that these discursive encounters might suggest some of the potential benefits of greater dialogue between disciplines, and between the academy and creative practice more generally."
"The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN) brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.
Interest in performance reflects a movement away from thinking in terms of immutable objects and singular subjects. It focuses attention on collective contexts. It also models a different way to mean: so performances, theatricality, theatre, and the arts in practice are relevant, too. But the group’s main focus is on the potential of the idea of performance as an umbrella approach to culture: a 'kind of thinking in its own right' (Cull/Minors 2012).
What does it mean to frame, stage, display or enact? In what sense might all forms of self-consciously public statements – art, politics, academic discourse – be seen as performance?
How is our post-print digital era, with its forces of equivalence and convergence, prompting reconsideration of traditional categories and boundaries – ie of the disciplinary itself?
How do we understand objects (fixed, a record) when they cannot exist separate from their experience on the part of somebody or other (time-bound, embodied)?
How do we understand the subject when it depends on imagined and actual collectivities to position itself?
Each session will be organized around two short but very different presentations, followed by a discussion. We hope that these discursive encounters might suggest some of the potential benefits of greater dialogue between disciplines, and between the academy and creative practice more generally."
Research Interests: Creative Writing, Intellectual History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Musicology, and 27 moreAnthropology, Comparative Politics, Philosophy of Science, Art History, Social Sciences, Architecture, Performance Studies, History of the Book, History of Science, Cultural Theory, Political Science, Adaptation, Performance, Built Environment, Creative Industries, Social and Collective Memory, Collective Memory, Urban Sociology, Social Practice, Medicine, Theatre, Tradition, Theatricality, Reification, Commodification, Performance Philosophy, and Philosophy of performance
"The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN) brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology,... more
"The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN) brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.
Interest in performance reflects a movement away from thinking in terms of immutable objects and singular subjects. It focuses attention on collective contexts. It also models a different way to mean: so performances, theatricality, theatre, and the arts in practice are relevant, too. But the group’s main focus is on the potential of the idea of performance as an umbrella approach to culture: a 'kind of thinking in its own right' (Cull/Minors 2012).
Each session will be organized around two short but very different presentations, followed by a discussion. We hope that these discursive encounters might suggest some of the potential benefits of greater dialogue between disciplines, and between the academy and creative practice more generally."
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/performance-network
@PerformNet (twitter)
Interest in performance reflects a movement away from thinking in terms of immutable objects and singular subjects. It focuses attention on collective contexts. It also models a different way to mean: so performances, theatricality, theatre, and the arts in practice are relevant, too. But the group’s main focus is on the potential of the idea of performance as an umbrella approach to culture: a 'kind of thinking in its own right' (Cull/Minors 2012).
Each session will be organized around two short but very different presentations, followed by a discussion. We hope that these discursive encounters might suggest some of the potential benefits of greater dialogue between disciplines, and between the academy and creative practice more generally."
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/performance-network
@PerformNet (twitter)
Research Interests:
Easter term Programme 27 April 2015 What do images do? Picturing Africa and Islam Massimilano Fusari (Centre for Media Studies, SOAS) Christos Lynteris and Branwyn Poleykett (Visual Plague, CRASSH) 11 May Theatricality Clare... more
Easter term Programme
27 April 2015
What do images do? Picturing Africa and Islam
Massimilano Fusari (Centre for Media Studies, SOAS)
Christos Lynteris and Branwyn Poleykett (Visual Plague, CRASSH)
11 May
Theatricality
Clare Foster (Classical Reception/Film, UCL)
Sophie Nield (Drama and Theatre, RHUL)
4 June 2015
How art performs society
Roger Sansi (Anthropology, Goldsmiths)
Chair: Dame Marilyn Strathern (Anthropology, Cambridge)
8 June 2015
Framing the Future: The impact of the digital era
Sheila Hayman (film maker and journalist)
Also of Interest:
8 June 2015
Creative Labour(er): Perspectives on the Work of Art
Conference at King’s College
Anthropologies of Art (A/A) Network
The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN), convened by Jonas Tinius (Social Anthropology, Cambridge) and Dr Clare Foster (Classical Reception, Cambridge/UCL), brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.
27 April 2015
What do images do? Picturing Africa and Islam
Massimilano Fusari (Centre for Media Studies, SOAS)
Christos Lynteris and Branwyn Poleykett (Visual Plague, CRASSH)
11 May
Theatricality
Clare Foster (Classical Reception/Film, UCL)
Sophie Nield (Drama and Theatre, RHUL)
4 June 2015
How art performs society
Roger Sansi (Anthropology, Goldsmiths)
Chair: Dame Marilyn Strathern (Anthropology, Cambridge)
8 June 2015
Framing the Future: The impact of the digital era
Sheila Hayman (film maker and journalist)
Also of Interest:
8 June 2015
Creative Labour(er): Perspectives on the Work of Art
Conference at King’s College
Anthropologies of Art (A/A) Network
The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN), convened by Jonas Tinius (Social Anthropology, Cambridge) and Dr Clare Foster (Classical Reception, Cambridge/UCL), brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.
Research Interests: Classics, Visual Studies, Visual Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, and 12 morePerformance Studies, Interdisciplinarity, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Anthropology Of Art, Performance, Creative Industries, Classical Reception Studies, Theatre, Theatricality, Creative Labour, and The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre
Lent Programme 12 January - Causing a Scene! One-day Symposium Professor Peter W. Marx (Institute for Theatre and MediaCulture, University of Cologne) Dr Scott Head (Visiting Professor, Anthropology, UCL/Brazil) Jaspreet Singh... more
Lent Programme
12 January - Causing a Scene! One-day Symposium
Professor Peter W. Marx (Institute for Theatre and MediaCulture, University of Cologne)
Dr Scott Head (Visiting Professor, Anthropology, UCL/Brazil)
Jaspreet Singh Boparai (Classics, Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, Cambridge)
19 January - 'Performing Laboratories Workshop'
Professor Wenzel Geissler (Anthropology, Oslo)
Professor Roger Kneebone (Medicine, Imperial College London)
Professor Mike Pearson (Performance Studies, Aberystwyth)
Pedro Robelo (Composer/Artist, Queen‘s University, Belfast)
2 February - 'Institutions and the Avant-garde'
Dr Gigi Argyropoulou (Artist/Curator/Researcher, Birkbeck)
Prof Georgina Born (Anthropology/Music, Oxford)
Dr Pascal Gielen (Sociology of Arts, Groningen)
Chair: Jonas Tinius (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)
16 February - 'Truth and Reconciliation Performed'
Dr Andrea Grant (African Studies, Cambridge)
Dr Ananda Breed (Performing Arts Development, University of East London)
Chair: Ariana Phillips (Music, Cambridge) & Revd Dr Tim Jenkins (Divinity, Cambridge)
2 March - “The Drama of Ideas“: Performativity and Intellectuals
Professor Patrick Baert & Dr Marcus Morgan (Sociology, Cambridge)
Chair: Floris Schuiling (Music, Cambridge)
23 April - Free For All Symposium
'On the concept of performance'
The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN), convened by Jonas Tinius (Social Anthropology, Cambridge) and Dr Clare Foster (Classics/Film Studies, Cambridge/UCL), brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.
12 January - Causing a Scene! One-day Symposium
Professor Peter W. Marx (Institute for Theatre and MediaCulture, University of Cologne)
Dr Scott Head (Visiting Professor, Anthropology, UCL/Brazil)
Jaspreet Singh Boparai (Classics, Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, Cambridge)
19 January - 'Performing Laboratories Workshop'
Professor Wenzel Geissler (Anthropology, Oslo)
Professor Roger Kneebone (Medicine, Imperial College London)
Professor Mike Pearson (Performance Studies, Aberystwyth)
Pedro Robelo (Composer/Artist, Queen‘s University, Belfast)
2 February - 'Institutions and the Avant-garde'
Dr Gigi Argyropoulou (Artist/Curator/Researcher, Birkbeck)
Prof Georgina Born (Anthropology/Music, Oxford)
Dr Pascal Gielen (Sociology of Arts, Groningen)
Chair: Jonas Tinius (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)
16 February - 'Truth and Reconciliation Performed'
Dr Andrea Grant (African Studies, Cambridge)
Dr Ananda Breed (Performing Arts Development, University of East London)
Chair: Ariana Phillips (Music, Cambridge) & Revd Dr Tim Jenkins (Divinity, Cambridge)
2 March - “The Drama of Ideas“: Performativity and Intellectuals
Professor Patrick Baert & Dr Marcus Morgan (Sociology, Cambridge)
Chair: Floris Schuiling (Music, Cambridge)
23 April - Free For All Symposium
'On the concept of performance'
The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN), convened by Jonas Tinius (Social Anthropology, Cambridge) and Dr Clare Foster (Classics/Film Studies, Cambridge/UCL), brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.
Research Interests:
Panel discussion: Nick Thomas (Director, MAA, Cambridge) will be in conversation with Inka Bertz (Head of Collections, Jewish Museum Berlin), Verena Lepper (Curator, Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, Berlin), Sven Sappelt (Curator,... more
Panel discussion: Nick Thomas (Director, MAA, Cambridge) will be in conversation with Inka Bertz (Head of Collections, Jewish Museum Berlin), Verena Lepper (Curator, Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, Berlin), Sven Sappelt (Curator, Humboldt-Lab, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), and Bernd Scherer (Director, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin), chaired by Sharon Macdonald (CARMaH)
Open to all. Registration required, please email:
carmah-conference@hu-berlin.de
4 July 2016
5-7pm
Room 408
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie
Mohrenstraße 40/41, 10117 Berlin
https://www.euroethno.hu-berlin.de/de/carmah/upcoming.events
Open to all. Registration required, please email:
carmah-conference@hu-berlin.de
4 July 2016
5-7pm
Room 408
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie
Mohrenstraße 40/41, 10117 Berlin
https://www.euroethno.hu-berlin.de/de/carmah/upcoming.events
Research Interests: Anthropology, Museum Studies, Cultural Heritage, Heritage Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 17 moreMuseum Education, Museum Anthropology, History of Museums, Anthropology Of Art, Museums and Exhibition Design, History of Collections, Collecting and Collections, Cultural Anthropology, Museology, Modern Germany, Museums, Berlin, Museum and Heritage Studies, Berlin and Memory, Humboldt-Forum, Anthropology of Cultural Heritage, and Museum of Anthropology & Archaeology
Building on established anthropological approaches to art such as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, the Anthropologies of Art Network (A/A) seeks to extend the canon by curating new encounters on fields and discourses, including... more
Building on established anthropological approaches to art such as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, the Anthropologies of Art Network (A/A) seeks to extend the canon by curating new encounters on fields and discourses, including but not limited to international art biennales, post-Fordist artistic labour, global art markets, contemporary art patronage, and artivism. (A/A) facilitates international collaborations and aims to engage recent theories of art such as relational aesthetics, ethnographic conceptualism, and creative microtopias.
Its three constitutive elements are: NETWORK - browse profiles for research interests and contact details. ARTICLES - op-ed style pieces on the relation between anthropology and art. NEWS - upcoming CfPs, book launches, funding calls, conferences, exhibitions
Check out our first article on UTOPIA, ART, ANTHROPOLOGY by Ruy Blanes (University of Bergen) and Maïté Maskens (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Interested? Contact the convenors Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius
www.anthropologies-of-art.net | @Anth_Art
Its three constitutive elements are: NETWORK - browse profiles for research interests and contact details. ARTICLES - op-ed style pieces on the relation between anthropology and art. NEWS - upcoming CfPs, book launches, funding calls, conferences, exhibitions
Check out our first article on UTOPIA, ART, ANTHROPOLOGY by Ruy Blanes (University of Bergen) and Maïté Maskens (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Interested? Contact the convenors Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius
www.anthropologies-of-art.net | @Anth_Art
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Anthropology, Art History, Performing Arts, Cultural Sociology, and 24 moreArt, Art Theory, Creativity, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Philosophy of Art, Anthropology of space, Performance Art, Politics, Identity politics, Urban Studies, Anthropology Of Art, Contemporary Arts, Sociology of Arts, Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology of Art, History of Art, Visual Arts, 20th century Avant-Garde, Fine Arts, Relational aesthetics, Kunstgeschichte, and Alfred Gell
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Conference outline Museums and heritage are a dynamic field in which scholars and practitioners are in search of new ways of thinking and doing. What are some of the liveliest areas of debate and conceptual energy? How do or might these... more
Conference outline
Museums and heritage are a dynamic field in which scholars and practitioners are in search of new ways of thinking and doing. What are some of the liveliest areas of debate and conceptual energy? How do or might these reshape museum practice?
This conference, which takes place from 26th – 28th July 2017, brings together international scholars and practitioners to think creatively, critically, and anthropologically about some of the liveliest concepts and practices circulating in museums and heritage today. The conference explores their potential for transforming museum practice. What do they change? Who and what do they bring into museums and heritage and who and what do they leave out? And what are their conceptual limitations or stumbling blocks in practice?
Thinking even further, how can such concepts be extended or reshaped to further energise their transformative potential? Or what happens when we put them into dialogue with other areas of theorising or practice?
In a format designed to foster such exchange and questions, this conference seeks to look at other ways of being wise in order to think otherwise about museums and heritage today.
Call for Contributions
For this call for contributions, we are seeking proposals that explore currently underused concepts, especially those drawn from ethnographic theory or practice, which are productive for analysing or rethinking museums and heritage. We therefore invite abstracts of 250 words that set out a chosen concept, explaining its source (including in your own work if relevant) and why you think it should be taken up in the theory and/or practice of museums and heritage in the future.
Further details
Selected participants will become table hosts during a world café, a format that aims to facilitate open discussion and link ideas within a larger group to access the collective intelligence in the room. World café participants move between a series of tables to join into a discussion in response to a set of questions, which are predetermined and focused on the specific topic of the table. The discussions of the day will be summarized at the end by table hosts.
Applicants should be at least in the third year of PhD and within less than three years after completion.
Selected participants will receive a travel bursary up to 300 € (Europe) or 800 € (outside Europe). We gladly provide help with accommodation, if requested.
Application
Please submit the separate application form from this page to carmah-conference(at)hu-berlin.de by 15th February 2017.
We aim to inform applicants of the outcome by 1st March 2017 so that appropriate travel arrangements can be made in advance.
Museums and heritage are a dynamic field in which scholars and practitioners are in search of new ways of thinking and doing. What are some of the liveliest areas of debate and conceptual energy? How do or might these reshape museum practice?
This conference, which takes place from 26th – 28th July 2017, brings together international scholars and practitioners to think creatively, critically, and anthropologically about some of the liveliest concepts and practices circulating in museums and heritage today. The conference explores their potential for transforming museum practice. What do they change? Who and what do they bring into museums and heritage and who and what do they leave out? And what are their conceptual limitations or stumbling blocks in practice?
Thinking even further, how can such concepts be extended or reshaped to further energise their transformative potential? Or what happens when we put them into dialogue with other areas of theorising or practice?
In a format designed to foster such exchange and questions, this conference seeks to look at other ways of being wise in order to think otherwise about museums and heritage today.
Call for Contributions
For this call for contributions, we are seeking proposals that explore currently underused concepts, especially those drawn from ethnographic theory or practice, which are productive for analysing or rethinking museums and heritage. We therefore invite abstracts of 250 words that set out a chosen concept, explaining its source (including in your own work if relevant) and why you think it should be taken up in the theory and/or practice of museums and heritage in the future.
Further details
Selected participants will become table hosts during a world café, a format that aims to facilitate open discussion and link ideas within a larger group to access the collective intelligence in the room. World café participants move between a series of tables to join into a discussion in response to a set of questions, which are predetermined and focused on the specific topic of the table. The discussions of the day will be summarized at the end by table hosts.
Applicants should be at least in the third year of PhD and within less than three years after completion.
Selected participants will receive a travel bursary up to 300 € (Europe) or 800 € (outside Europe). We gladly provide help with accommodation, if requested.
Application
Please submit the separate application form from this page to carmah-conference(at)hu-berlin.de by 15th February 2017.
We aim to inform applicants of the outcome by 1st March 2017 so that appropriate travel arrangements can be made in advance.
Research Interests:
Conveners Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge) Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge) Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge) Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge) Summary This... more
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Summary
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Keynote speaker: Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Featuring: Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford), Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale); The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame); Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; METIS/World Factory; Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art; New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton); performance architect Helen Stratford; Associate director of the Young Vic Nathalie Abrahami; Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL, and others....
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Summary
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Keynote speaker: Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Featuring: Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford), Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale); The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame); Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; METIS/World Factory; Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art; New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton); performance architect Helen Stratford; Associate director of the Young Vic Nathalie Abrahami; Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL, and others....
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Research Interests:
One-Day Workshop at King's College Cambridge
Research Interests:
For some, performance is a science that elicits knowledge about the world. For others, science is performance, and there is little doubt that science at least in part relies on performative qualities to take effect. Contributors to this... more
For some, performance is a science that elicits knowledge about the world. For others, science is performance, and there is little doubt that science at least in part relies on performative qualities to take effect. Contributors to this panel share an interest in science and performance, either way. From the performance of landscape in contemporary archaeological excavation and site-specific theatre, to taking seriously the operating theatre as a performative space by re-enacting 1970s surgical practices; from the well-marketed reality-TV thrills of contemporary emerging virus science, to the quiet stage of an abandoned research station in the rainforest, and its reanimation by aged protagonists, the participants will engage in a conversation about the contact zones of science and theatre, and the possibilities and pitfalls of performance, staging and re-enactment in the history and anthropology of science.
19 January 2015, 13:30 - 19:00
jointly convened by Civic Matter and the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network
Speakers
MIKE PEARSON teaches Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK. Formerly an Artistic Director of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (1973-80) and Brith Gof (1981-97). He continues to make performance with Pearson/Brookes (1997-present). He is co-author of Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge: 2001) and In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape (Exeter University Press: 2006).
ROGER KNEEBONE is a clinician and educationalist who leads a multidisciplinary research group at Imperial College London. His innovative work on contextualised simulation builds on his personal experience as a surgeon and a general practitioner, and his interest in domains of expertise beyond medicine. He recently conducted simulation-based re-enactments of surgical operations in the 1980s.
GUILLAUME LACHENAL teaches history of science at the University Paris Diderot. He is a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research is on the history and anthropology of biomedicine in Africa, especially Cameroon. He combines the approaches of science studies, anthropology of health, and colonial and postcolonial studies to examine biopolitics and biosciences in Africa. His latest book is 'Le médicament qui devait sauver l'Afrique. Un scandale pharmaceutique aux colonies' (La Decouverte 2014).
MARIELE NEUDECKER is a visual artist who lives and works in Bristol, UK. She uses a broad range of media including sculpture, video and installation and works around notions of the Contemporary Sublime. She is engaged, along with Geissler and Kelly, and the photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva, in a project in a quasi-abandoned scientific research station in East Africa. She is currently working on a solo exhibition at Galerie Haas, Zurich, Switzerland and ‘Uncanny Reality, Models in Contemporary Art’, Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague. http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/;
http://www.bthumm.de/www/artists/neudecker/exhibitions.php;
http://www.rehbein-galerie.de/Mariele-Neudecker-Works.52.html
ANN KELLY teaches social and medical anthropology at the interdisciplinary Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the university of Exeter. She has worked and published extensively on medical science in Africa, in particular on infectious disease control and research, and especially malaria. She is a collaborator on the ESRC Memorials and Remains of African Science project. Together with Geissler, she has experimented on re-enactment of post-colonial medical research in East Africa.
WENZEL GEISSLER teaches social anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, and also works part time as director of research at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He has worked extensively on transnational
scientific research in Africa. His ongoing collaborative research focuses on the remains and memories of medical science. He is a collaborator on the Memorials and Remains of African Science project. His latest edited volume is 'Para-states and Medical Science' (Duke UP, 2014).
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25961
19 January 2015, 13:30 - 19:00
jointly convened by Civic Matter and the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network
Speakers
MIKE PEARSON teaches Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK. Formerly an Artistic Director of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (1973-80) and Brith Gof (1981-97). He continues to make performance with Pearson/Brookes (1997-present). He is co-author of Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge: 2001) and In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape (Exeter University Press: 2006).
ROGER KNEEBONE is a clinician and educationalist who leads a multidisciplinary research group at Imperial College London. His innovative work on contextualised simulation builds on his personal experience as a surgeon and a general practitioner, and his interest in domains of expertise beyond medicine. He recently conducted simulation-based re-enactments of surgical operations in the 1980s.
GUILLAUME LACHENAL teaches history of science at the University Paris Diderot. He is a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research is on the history and anthropology of biomedicine in Africa, especially Cameroon. He combines the approaches of science studies, anthropology of health, and colonial and postcolonial studies to examine biopolitics and biosciences in Africa. His latest book is 'Le médicament qui devait sauver l'Afrique. Un scandale pharmaceutique aux colonies' (La Decouverte 2014).
MARIELE NEUDECKER is a visual artist who lives and works in Bristol, UK. She uses a broad range of media including sculpture, video and installation and works around notions of the Contemporary Sublime. She is engaged, along with Geissler and Kelly, and the photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva, in a project in a quasi-abandoned scientific research station in East Africa. She is currently working on a solo exhibition at Galerie Haas, Zurich, Switzerland and ‘Uncanny Reality, Models in Contemporary Art’, Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague. http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/;
http://www.bthumm.de/www/artists/neudecker/exhibitions.php;
http://www.rehbein-galerie.de/Mariele-Neudecker-Works.52.html
ANN KELLY teaches social and medical anthropology at the interdisciplinary Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the university of Exeter. She has worked and published extensively on medical science in Africa, in particular on infectious disease control and research, and especially malaria. She is a collaborator on the ESRC Memorials and Remains of African Science project. Together with Geissler, she has experimented on re-enactment of post-colonial medical research in East Africa.
WENZEL GEISSLER teaches social anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, and also works part time as director of research at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He has worked extensively on transnational
scientific research in Africa. His ongoing collaborative research focuses on the remains and memories of medical science. He is a collaborator on the Memorials and Remains of African Science project. His latest edited volume is 'Para-states and Medical Science' (Duke UP, 2014).
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25961
Research Interests:
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways... more
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Featuring:
Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford)
Jen Harvie, Professor of theatre and performance, QMUL
Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale)
The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame)
Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home
METIS/World Factory
Lucy Ellison, artist (Grounded, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill)
Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art, BA Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL
Khadija Caroll, artist, Humboldt Foundation fellow, author Art in the Time of Colony
New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton)
Helen Stratford, performance architect
Eirini Kartsaki
Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL
Rachel Beckles-Willson, Professor of Music, RHUL
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Featuring:
Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford)
Jen Harvie, Professor of theatre and performance, QMUL
Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale)
The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame)
Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home
METIS/World Factory
Lucy Ellison, artist (Grounded, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill)
Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art, BA Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL
Khadija Caroll, artist, Humboldt Foundation fellow, author Art in the Time of Colony
New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton)
Helen Stratford, performance architect
Eirini Kartsaki
Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL
Rachel Beckles-Willson, Professor of Music, RHUL
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Research Interests:
We hereby would like to invite you to the CARMAH Public Lecture Objects Otherwise by Haidy Geismar (Anthropology, University College London) on 26 July 2017 at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin. Please find more information below. If... more
We hereby would like to invite you to the CARMAH Public Lecture Objects Otherwise by Haidy Geismar (Anthropology, University College London) on 26 July 2017 at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin. Please find more information below. If you wish to attend, please register via carmah-conference@hu-berlin.de by 17 July 2017 (noon). As space is limited, registration is obligatory. Please bring your confirmation to registration (print-out or show on phone). Feel free to circulate the email and attached poster among interested colleagues.
This talk takes as its focus four objects from different collections that I have worked with over the past years. A box. A cloak. An Effigy. A pen. Each object opens up a host of questions about the interaction between old collections and new technologies, about processes of translation, remediation, and representation, about the legacy of nineteenth century colonialism and collecting within twenty-first century new media; and about the re-articulation of locality and cultural difference within museum technologies. How do new technologies, such as 3D-printing, scanning, social media, and new web-based interfaces alter our understandings of what a collection is, how objects encode knowledge and meaning, tell stories, and what spaces are being created for cultural differences? Here I synthesise my work over many years with ethnographic collections from the Pacific, with photography collections, and with new media, to explore the object lessons and politics of perspective that are emerging for the twenty-first century collections.
Haidy Geismar is Reader in Anthropology at University College London where she is also Vice Dean for Strategic Projects and the Curator of the UCL Ethnography Collections. Since 2000 she has worked with museum collections and communities in Vanuatu and New Zealand. Her research focuses on the contemporary resonance of historical collections, indigenous articulations of intellectual and cultural property, indigenous contemporary art, the politics of display and critical museology, and the capacity of new media to translate and remediate cultural protocols and the materiality of artefacts. She has published extensively on these issues, including 'Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Malakula since 1914' (2010, University of Hawaii Press, with Anita Herle and collaborators in Vanuatu, winner of the John Collier Prize for Anthropological work on still photography), and 'Treasured Possessions’ (2013, Duke University Press. She is in the early stages of a project looking at the skill and knowledge networks embedded within digital photography. Her keynote draws from a forthcoming book, focused on the translation of old collections into new media, entitled 'Museum Object Lessons for the Twenty-first Century'.
This talk takes as its focus four objects from different collections that I have worked with over the past years. A box. A cloak. An Effigy. A pen. Each object opens up a host of questions about the interaction between old collections and new technologies, about processes of translation, remediation, and representation, about the legacy of nineteenth century colonialism and collecting within twenty-first century new media; and about the re-articulation of locality and cultural difference within museum technologies. How do new technologies, such as 3D-printing, scanning, social media, and new web-based interfaces alter our understandings of what a collection is, how objects encode knowledge and meaning, tell stories, and what spaces are being created for cultural differences? Here I synthesise my work over many years with ethnographic collections from the Pacific, with photography collections, and with new media, to explore the object lessons and politics of perspective that are emerging for the twenty-first century collections.
Haidy Geismar is Reader in Anthropology at University College London where she is also Vice Dean for Strategic Projects and the Curator of the UCL Ethnography Collections. Since 2000 she has worked with museum collections and communities in Vanuatu and New Zealand. Her research focuses on the contemporary resonance of historical collections, indigenous articulations of intellectual and cultural property, indigenous contemporary art, the politics of display and critical museology, and the capacity of new media to translate and remediate cultural protocols and the materiality of artefacts. She has published extensively on these issues, including 'Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Malakula since 1914' (2010, University of Hawaii Press, with Anita Herle and collaborators in Vanuatu, winner of the John Collier Prize for Anthropological work on still photography), and 'Treasured Possessions’ (2013, Duke University Press. She is in the early stages of a project looking at the skill and knowledge networks embedded within digital photography. Her keynote draws from a forthcoming book, focused on the translation of old collections into new media, entitled 'Museum Object Lessons for the Twenty-first Century'.
Research Interests:
Call for Papers - Panel at upcoming fourth major RAI Conference at the British Museum, 1-3 June 2018 The Future of Anthropological Representation: Contemporary Art and/in the Ethnographic Museum Short abstract Interactions between... more
Call for Papers - Panel at upcoming fourth major RAI Conference at the British Museum, 1-3 June 2018
The Future of Anthropological Representation: Contemporary Art and/in the Ethnographic Museum
Short abstract
Interactions between ethnographic museums and contemporary art have been contentious-appropriative and short-lived for some, a creative and necessary way forward for others. This panel investigates the manifold possibilities, histories, and possible futures of this relation.
Long abstract
Interactions between ethnographic museums and contemporary art have been contentious; while artists have become more sensitised to anthropological issues in recent years and many museums worldwide have invited artistic interventions in their collections, many see these exchanges as short-lived, superficial and appropriative responses to a deeper crisis of representation and legitimation. This panel investigates which possible other futures of this relation between ethnographic museums (and their collections) and contemporary art are imaginable, and which histories or traditions of this exchange have preceded the present situation. Ethnographic museums are no longer mere repositories of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic items, but are opening up as relational research sites. Museums around the world open their stores for (artistic) research collaborations, working towards a relational museum that itself becomes a fieldsite. At the same time, the contemporary art world has appropriated and worked with theories, discourses, and methods formerly associated with anthropological research. Encapsulated in Hal Foster's seminal article on the artist as ethnographer, artistic interest in alterity, indigeneity, and decolonisation has taken centre stage at the biggest contemporary art exhibitions, from documenta to the Venice Biennale. This panel welcomes papers, from artistic, anthropological, and/or curatorial perspectives, that may address the following themes: comparative and/or historical case studies of exemplary exhibitions, studies of collaborations between ethnographic museums and artists beyond exhibitions, critical examinations of the role of indigeneity, identity, and cultural appropriation in artistic engagement with ethnographic museums, the role(s) of the curator as mediator, analyses of prevalent theoretical concepts (alterity, 'the ethnographic', Global South, world cultures, decolonisation).
Panel conceived with Margareta von Oswald (Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
The Future of Anthropological Representation: Contemporary Art and/in the Ethnographic Museum
Short abstract
Interactions between ethnographic museums and contemporary art have been contentious-appropriative and short-lived for some, a creative and necessary way forward for others. This panel investigates the manifold possibilities, histories, and possible futures of this relation.
Long abstract
Interactions between ethnographic museums and contemporary art have been contentious; while artists have become more sensitised to anthropological issues in recent years and many museums worldwide have invited artistic interventions in their collections, many see these exchanges as short-lived, superficial and appropriative responses to a deeper crisis of representation and legitimation. This panel investigates which possible other futures of this relation between ethnographic museums (and their collections) and contemporary art are imaginable, and which histories or traditions of this exchange have preceded the present situation. Ethnographic museums are no longer mere repositories of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic items, but are opening up as relational research sites. Museums around the world open their stores for (artistic) research collaborations, working towards a relational museum that itself becomes a fieldsite. At the same time, the contemporary art world has appropriated and worked with theories, discourses, and methods formerly associated with anthropological research. Encapsulated in Hal Foster's seminal article on the artist as ethnographer, artistic interest in alterity, indigeneity, and decolonisation has taken centre stage at the biggest contemporary art exhibitions, from documenta to the Venice Biennale. This panel welcomes papers, from artistic, anthropological, and/or curatorial perspectives, that may address the following themes: comparative and/or historical case studies of exemplary exhibitions, studies of collaborations between ethnographic museums and artists beyond exhibitions, critical examinations of the role of indigeneity, identity, and cultural appropriation in artistic engagement with ethnographic museums, the role(s) of the curator as mediator, analyses of prevalent theoretical concepts (alterity, 'the ethnographic', Global South, world cultures, decolonisation).
Panel conceived with Margareta von Oswald (Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Research Interests: Anthropology, Museum Studies, Material Culture Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Art, and 14 moreSocial and Cultural Anthropology, Colonialism, Museum Anthropology, History of Museums, National Museums, Global South, Decolonisation, Museums, Representation, Exhibitions, Ethnological Museums, History of Exhibitions, Ethnographic Museums, and Curating contemporary art
Building on established anthropological approaches to art such as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, this workshop seeks to map out contemporary anthropological approaches to art. Furthermore, by asking what distinct views on... more
Building on established anthropological approaches to art such as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, this workshop seeks to map out contemporary anthropological approaches to art. Furthermore, by asking what distinct views on artistic practices are offered by such new theoretical perspectives as ethnographic conceptualism (Ssorin-Chaikov 2013) or relational aesthetics (Sansi 2014), we hope to propose new pathways of anthropological inquiry. A key proposition behind this workshop is the idea that contemporary art theory and practice are increasingly in dialogue with theories of sociality – how we relate to other people to create meaning – and therefore connected to core anthropological interests. The objective of this workshop is therefore not just to apply existing anthropological theory to potentially new ethnographic situations characterized by the production of art, but to develop anthropological theory through an engagement with the conceptual approaches that underpin the contemporary production of art today.
As an Anthropologies of Art [A/A] Network research event, the conference also seeks to map out a range of contemporary approaches to the study of art. Contributors from Oslo, Berlin, Moscow, Barcelona, and the UK will discuss case studies that impact on the production of contemporary anthropological theory.
Convenors and contact
Alex Flynn (alex.flynn@durham.ac.uk) and Jonas Tinius (jlt46@cam.ac.uk)
More information
http://www.anthropologies-of-art.net/aa-research/workshop | @Anth_Art
Funded by the Department of Anthropology, Durham University, and the Department of Anthropology's Social Anthropology research group
As an Anthropologies of Art [A/A] Network research event, the conference also seeks to map out a range of contemporary approaches to the study of art. Contributors from Oslo, Berlin, Moscow, Barcelona, and the UK will discuss case studies that impact on the production of contemporary anthropological theory.
Convenors and contact
Alex Flynn (alex.flynn@durham.ac.uk) and Jonas Tinius (jlt46@cam.ac.uk)
More information
http://www.anthropologies-of-art.net/aa-research/workshop | @Anth_Art
Funded by the Department of Anthropology, Durham University, and the Department of Anthropology's Social Anthropology research group
Research Interests: Anthropology, Visual Studies, Visual Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Art Theory, and 15 moreContemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Theory, Anthropology Of Art, Pierre Bourdieu, Theory and Practice of Visual Arts, Curatorial Practice (Art), Cultural Anthropology, Ethnographic Methods, Relational aesthetics, Alfred Gell, Participatory and Relational Arts, Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, Curating contemporary art, and Anthropology of Arts
This one-day international conference interrogates the relation between contemporary artistic production and postfordist labour relations. How do artists work today? As an Anthropologies of Art (A/A) Network research event, the... more
This one-day international conference interrogates the relation between contemporary artistic production and postfordist labour relations. How do artists work today?
As an Anthropologies of Art (A/A) Network research event, the conference also seeks to map out a range of contemporary approaches to a wider set of questions:
- What can anthropological analysis contribute to understanding the changing nature of labour, flexibilisation, and the entrepreneurial subject?
- In what ways do freelance artists reflect or perpetuate flexible working conditions?
- What are the distinctions between artistic self-making and artistic self-marketing?
Contributors from France, The Netherlands, Germany, and the UK will be discussing case studies addressing artistic production in music, law, film, theatre, and visual art.
KEYNOTE: Georgina Born (Music/Anthropology, Oxford)
Organiser: Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, Cambridge)
http://www.anthropologies-of-art.net/aa-research/conference
As an Anthropologies of Art (A/A) Network research event, the conference also seeks to map out a range of contemporary approaches to a wider set of questions:
- What can anthropological analysis contribute to understanding the changing nature of labour, flexibilisation, and the entrepreneurial subject?
- In what ways do freelance artists reflect or perpetuate flexible working conditions?
- What are the distinctions between artistic self-making and artistic self-marketing?
Contributors from France, The Netherlands, Germany, and the UK will be discussing case studies addressing artistic production in music, law, film, theatre, and visual art.
KEYNOTE: Georgina Born (Music/Anthropology, Oxford)
Organiser: Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, Cambridge)
http://www.anthropologies-of-art.net/aa-research/conference
Research Interests: Musicology, Anthropology, Art History, Sociology of Work, Contemporary Art, and 13 moreSocial and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, Cultural Musicology, Creative Industries, Labour Studies, Precarity, Work and Labour, Aesthetics and Ethics, Contemporary Music, Creative City, Postfordism, Creative Economy, and Luc Boltanski
Short Abstract This panel revitalises an engagement with patronage through the framework of relational aesthetics. It explores contexts in which contemporary art patronage unveils, reproduces or conceals complex transnational... more
Short Abstract
This panel revitalises an engagement with patronage through the framework of relational aesthetics. It explores contexts in which contemporary art patronage unveils, reproduces or conceals complex transnational relational networks and intimate collaborations between ethical subjects and polities.
Long Abstract
Since 1945 the global art market has grown from 500,000 collectors to 450 million 'art consumers'. Web 2.0 platforms have been central to an exponential growth of anonymous commodity-centric transactions. And yet, intimate collaboration and privileged relations remain intrinsic to art market phenomena. In 2013, Munich police confiscated 1,406 artworks, many of which had been thought destroyed or lost. The 'Gurlitt case' throws light on complex scenarios; how did Gurlitt and the intervention of a fascist state subvert or recreate the relations inherent to the art works that he hoarded?
The anthropology of art, through Bishop, Bourdieu, and Becker, has a long tradition in addressing the moral economic complexities of art markets. As Arthur Danto put it provocatively, 'to see something as art requires... an artworld'. Following Boltanski and Chiapello, recent scholarship has investigated how new management logics have appropriated a vision of the artist as a self-cultivating entrepreneur. These perspectives provide compelling understandings of how we imagine the art world today, and continue to structure the way we theorise collaboration between artists, art consumers, galleries, and the media.
This panel however investigates how collaboration, intimacy and technology make visible, reproduce or even sever relations within the social life of art networks today. Therefore this panel explores how we can conceptualise art works and patronage at the intersection of the intimate and the transnational, the technologically commoditised and the personal, collaboration and disengagement.
This panel revitalises an engagement with patronage through the framework of relational aesthetics. It explores contexts in which contemporary art patronage unveils, reproduces or conceals complex transnational relational networks and intimate collaborations between ethical subjects and polities.
Long Abstract
Since 1945 the global art market has grown from 500,000 collectors to 450 million 'art consumers'. Web 2.0 platforms have been central to an exponential growth of anonymous commodity-centric transactions. And yet, intimate collaboration and privileged relations remain intrinsic to art market phenomena. In 2013, Munich police confiscated 1,406 artworks, many of which had been thought destroyed or lost. The 'Gurlitt case' throws light on complex scenarios; how did Gurlitt and the intervention of a fascist state subvert or recreate the relations inherent to the art works that he hoarded?
The anthropology of art, through Bishop, Bourdieu, and Becker, has a long tradition in addressing the moral economic complexities of art markets. As Arthur Danto put it provocatively, 'to see something as art requires... an artworld'. Following Boltanski and Chiapello, recent scholarship has investigated how new management logics have appropriated a vision of the artist as a self-cultivating entrepreneur. These perspectives provide compelling understandings of how we imagine the art world today, and continue to structure the way we theorise collaboration between artists, art consumers, galleries, and the media.
This panel however investigates how collaboration, intimacy and technology make visible, reproduce or even sever relations within the social life of art networks today. Therefore this panel explores how we can conceptualise art works and patronage at the intersection of the intimate and the transnational, the technologically commoditised and the personal, collaboration and disengagement.
Research Interests:
‘Art and Nativism’ [Anthropology and the Arts Network, Panel 098] https://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6521 Call for Papers: 27 February to 9 April Convenors: Roger Sansi (Universitat de Barcelona) Jonas Tinius... more
‘Art and Nativism’ [Anthropology and the Arts Network, Panel 098]
https://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6521
Call for Papers: 27 February to 9 April
Convenors: Roger Sansi (Universitat de Barcelona) Jonas Tinius (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Short abstract
Over the last years, we witnessed a spread of nativist movements across the globe. Reacting to perceived threats of migration and globalisation, they frequently stress nation and belonging. What can we learn from the relations between art, identity, and mobility to think through such movements?
Long abstract
Over the last years, we have been witnessing a growth (and return) of nativist populist political movements across the globe. These movements react against perceived threats of globalisation, migration, and foreign influence. Art is central to nativism. Like any political movement, nativism needs to perform and represent itself, to create images, myths, and rituals. The objective of this panel is to address the intersection of art and nativism.
While anthropologists have studied nativism for a long time (Linton 1940), they have mostly been concerned with ́minority' and 'native' populations whose cultural practices and societies were perceived to be under threat from, usually, Euro- American colonial and capitalist populations. Nowadays, paradoxically, nativist movements are spreading amongst the very white Euro-American populations that in the past were threatening these other 'native' societies. However, even if nativism today is commonly associated with anti-immigration right-wing movements, left-wing anti-globalisation movements also mobilise nativist arguments.
This panel proposes to think about nativism through art. Activist art has been associated with left-wing, liberal, and cosmopolitan politics, in theory the opposite of nativism, but often cosmopolitan art has been fascinated with native, minority, and "local" politics ("the ethnographic turn") in opposition to globalisation. But what is the relation between activist art and decolonial indigenous movements today? And new European nationalist movements? How do artistic practices intervene in the tense relation between migration, nativism, and citizenship; staying, moving, and settling? We invite papers from any ethnographic context willing to address these questions boldly and without prejudice.
Take a look at the website of the Anthropology and the Arts Network [ANTART] for more information on past events and publications and how to join and participate: https://www.easaonline.org/networks/antart/
https://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6521
Call for Papers: 27 February to 9 April
Convenors: Roger Sansi (Universitat de Barcelona) Jonas Tinius (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Short abstract
Over the last years, we witnessed a spread of nativist movements across the globe. Reacting to perceived threats of migration and globalisation, they frequently stress nation and belonging. What can we learn from the relations between art, identity, and mobility to think through such movements?
Long abstract
Over the last years, we have been witnessing a growth (and return) of nativist populist political movements across the globe. These movements react against perceived threats of globalisation, migration, and foreign influence. Art is central to nativism. Like any political movement, nativism needs to perform and represent itself, to create images, myths, and rituals. The objective of this panel is to address the intersection of art and nativism.
While anthropologists have studied nativism for a long time (Linton 1940), they have mostly been concerned with ́minority' and 'native' populations whose cultural practices and societies were perceived to be under threat from, usually, Euro- American colonial and capitalist populations. Nowadays, paradoxically, nativist movements are spreading amongst the very white Euro-American populations that in the past were threatening these other 'native' societies. However, even if nativism today is commonly associated with anti-immigration right-wing movements, left-wing anti-globalisation movements also mobilise nativist arguments.
This panel proposes to think about nativism through art. Activist art has been associated with left-wing, liberal, and cosmopolitan politics, in theory the opposite of nativism, but often cosmopolitan art has been fascinated with native, minority, and "local" politics ("the ethnographic turn") in opposition to globalisation. But what is the relation between activist art and decolonial indigenous movements today? And new European nationalist movements? How do artistic practices intervene in the tense relation between migration, nativism, and citizenship; staying, moving, and settling? We invite papers from any ethnographic context willing to address these questions boldly and without prejudice.
Take a look at the website of the Anthropology and the Arts Network [ANTART] for more information on past events and publications and how to join and participate: https://www.easaonline.org/networks/antart/
Research Interests:
How is time configured in processes of artistic and cultural production? And what does this tell us about ideas of history, tradition, and imagination? This panel invites papers that theorise the multiple temporalities of creative... more
How is time configured in processes of artistic and cultural production? And what does this tell us about ideas of history, tradition, and imagination? This panel invites papers that theorise the multiple temporalities of creative practices across the arts, music, and cultural production.
From the project temporalities of freelance artistic labour, to the microsocial temporalities of performance, improvisation or studio practices, to the longue durée of cultural heritage traditions, variable forms of time and temporality are evoked and produced in processes of cultural production. Drawing on diverse ethnographic contexts, this panel expands on anthropological theorisations of time and transformation by drawing on fieldwork exploring the temporalities of artistic, musical, and cultural processes. We wish to highlight the need to analyse the multiplicity of conceptions and enactments of time in cultural processes, taking seriously the contributions of the arts and music to the production and theorization of time. Art and music have a dual quality: they are situated within ongoing historical processes, but they also produce time in diverse ways. Rather than dwelling on analyses of particular artistic practices and their ephemerality, or on conceptions of heritage and deep time, we aim to highlight how the study of multiple temporalities in artistic and cultural production can inform our understanding of history, tradition, and imagination more generally and feed back into core discussions in the anthropology of time and cultural history. We invite papers from any ethnographic context to address the following questions raised by theme 4 (transformation and time): How does time figure in imaginative and artistic processes? How are pasts and futures articulated through material and aesthetic practices? How are institutions involved in canonizing the past, preserving the present or promoting change? How can aesthetics be thought anew in relation to temporal processes?
Propose a paper: https://tinyurl.com/y9qt5nvs
From the project temporalities of freelance artistic labour, to the microsocial temporalities of performance, improvisation or studio practices, to the longue durée of cultural heritage traditions, variable forms of time and temporality are evoked and produced in processes of cultural production. Drawing on diverse ethnographic contexts, this panel expands on anthropological theorisations of time and transformation by drawing on fieldwork exploring the temporalities of artistic, musical, and cultural processes. We wish to highlight the need to analyse the multiplicity of conceptions and enactments of time in cultural processes, taking seriously the contributions of the arts and music to the production and theorization of time. Art and music have a dual quality: they are situated within ongoing historical processes, but they also produce time in diverse ways. Rather than dwelling on analyses of particular artistic practices and their ephemerality, or on conceptions of heritage and deep time, we aim to highlight how the study of multiple temporalities in artistic and cultural production can inform our understanding of history, tradition, and imagination more generally and feed back into core discussions in the anthropology of time and cultural history. We invite papers from any ethnographic context to address the following questions raised by theme 4 (transformation and time): How does time figure in imaginative and artistic processes? How are pasts and futures articulated through material and aesthetic practices? How are institutions involved in canonizing the past, preserving the present or promoting change? How can aesthetics be thought anew in relation to temporal processes?
Propose a paper: https://tinyurl.com/y9qt5nvs
Research Interests:
“Alterity” describes a state of being other or different and has become an integral element of postcolonial criticism. The symposium approaches the term both from an artistic and anthropological perspective and asks: What comparisons,... more
“Alterity” describes a state of being other or different and has become an integral element of postcolonial criticism. The symposium approaches the term both from an artistic and anthropological perspective and asks: What comparisons, relationships, and standards does the construction of alterity imply?
Is alterity a relational and situational concept? How are differences manifested? Anthropologists, curators, art historians, and philosophers not only discuss how the concept can be utilized and mobilized in artistic practice, but also shed light on criticism and rethinking of it.
With contributions by Emmanuel Alloa, Khadija Zinnenburg Carroll, Hamid Dabashi, Martin Holbraad, Nora Sternfeld, Clio Nicastro, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Nigel Rapport, Alya Sebti, Rupert Stasch, Julian Warner, and others.
Organized by Jonas Tinius (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) as a guest at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and in cooperation with SAVVY Contemporary and Dis-Othering
https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_143155.php (detailed programme to follow)
Is alterity a relational and situational concept? How are differences manifested? Anthropologists, curators, art historians, and philosophers not only discuss how the concept can be utilized and mobilized in artistic practice, but also shed light on criticism and rethinking of it.
With contributions by Emmanuel Alloa, Khadija Zinnenburg Carroll, Hamid Dabashi, Martin Holbraad, Nora Sternfeld, Clio Nicastro, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Nigel Rapport, Alya Sebti, Rupert Stasch, Julian Warner, and others.
Organized by Jonas Tinius (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) as a guest at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and in cooperation with SAVVY Contemporary and Dis-Othering
https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_143155.php (detailed programme to follow)
Research Interests: Anthropology, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Phenomenology, Anthropology Of Art, and 8 moreCurating, Representation of Others, Otherness, Identity and Alterity, Other, Art History, Exhibition History, Museum and Curating Studies, Curating contemporary art, and Critical Museology
Building on such established anthropological approaches to art as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, this workshop seeks to map out contemporary anthropological approaches to art. Furthermore, by asking what distinct views on... more
Building on such established anthropological approaches to art as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, this workshop seeks to map out contemporary anthropological approaches to art. Furthermore, by asking what distinct views on artistic practices are offered by such new theoretical perspectives as ethnographic conceptualism (Ssorin-Chaikov 2013) or relational aesthetics (Sansi 2014), we hope to propose new pathways of anthropological inquiry. A key proposition behind this workshop is the idea that contemporary art theory and practice are increasingly in dialogue with theories of sociality – how we relate to other people to create meaning – and therefore connected to core anthropological interests. The objective of this workshop is therefore not just to apply existing anthropological theory to potentially new ethnographic situations characterized by the production of art, but to develop anthropological theory through an engagement with the conceptual approaches that underpin the contemporary production of art today.
The premise we wish to interrogate with this workshop is thus that there is something distinct about contemporary artistic practices. If this is so, what would a contemporary anthropology of art – or rather – contemporary anthropologies of art look like? As the inaugural research event of the Anthropologies of Art [A/A] network, we wish to propose this digital platform as a space to map, link, and interrogate answers to these two questions. Some possible lines of thought addressed by papers may be:
• How can we productively theorize the porous boundaries between artistic practice and every life activities?
• Has the body been overlooked as a site of artistic production? For example, can we consider the performance of gender as an aesthetics of becoming?
• What contribution can anthropology make to understandings of models of postfordist creative labour?
• What are the (dis)connections between artivism, protest, and public art?
• Can we consider the relationship between aesthetics and politics without a consideration of the state?
• How can we provide a better analysis of the porous boundaries of the art world and the market?
• What are the potentials of contemporary art for anthropological research? For example, how does the mode of artistic installation challenge and provoke alternative strategies of research?
The premise we wish to interrogate with this workshop is thus that there is something distinct about contemporary artistic practices. If this is so, what would a contemporary anthropology of art – or rather – contemporary anthropologies of art look like? As the inaugural research event of the Anthropologies of Art [A/A] network, we wish to propose this digital platform as a space to map, link, and interrogate answers to these two questions. Some possible lines of thought addressed by papers may be:
• How can we productively theorize the porous boundaries between artistic practice and every life activities?
• Has the body been overlooked as a site of artistic production? For example, can we consider the performance of gender as an aesthetics of becoming?
• What contribution can anthropology make to understandings of models of postfordist creative labour?
• What are the (dis)connections between artivism, protest, and public art?
• Can we consider the relationship between aesthetics and politics without a consideration of the state?
• How can we provide a better analysis of the porous boundaries of the art world and the market?
• What are the potentials of contemporary art for anthropological research? For example, how does the mode of artistic installation challenge and provoke alternative strategies of research?
Research Interests:
2019 Symposium of the Anthropology and the Arts EASA Network (ANTART) Art has always occupied an ambivalent position in anthropology; it has been subject to both fascination and scepticism. Alfred Gell went as far as positing that... more
2019 Symposium of the Anthropology and the Arts EASA Network (ANTART)
Art has always occupied an ambivalent position in anthropology; it has been subject to both fascination and scepticism. Alfred Gell went as far as positing that anthropology is essentially anti-art, advocating instead a ‘methodological philistinism’ and ‘resolute indifference’ in our study of modern and contemporary art. Aesthetics has often been questioned as a Western, Bourgeois construct. The anthropology of art historically departed from this paradoxical, iconoclastic rejection of art practice and in particular, art theory. In this workshop, we want to explore the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and reassess the role of art within the discipline. What is the trouble with art in anthropology? Our aim is to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the theoretical problems of anthropology, and a critical discipline of contemporary societies. The symposium is open to both senior and early-career scholars who are planning or conducting projects in the anthropology of art.
WHEN: Saturday-Sunday, 21-22 September 2019
WHERE: Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)
FORMAT: The Symposium will be composed of panels with 20-minute paper presentations, and roundtables with less formalized discussion inputs. Please indicate in your email to which format you wish to propose an idea. Panels and roundtables will then be formed based on the themes and submissions. We also welcome film, photo, or other media submissions as long as they respond to the theme and are within the time-frame of 20-minutes.
SUBMISSION: Please send your proposals (including a title and abstract of 250 words max and a short bio) to BOTH convenors by the DEADLINE of 31 March 2019. Contact details: Roger Sansi (rogersansi@ub.edu) & Jonas Tinius (jonas.tinius@hu-berlin.de)
The Network has a limited amount of supporting budget that can contribute towards accommodation costs for speakers. We acknowledge as sources of this funding the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museum and Heritage (CARMAH). The Centre is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as part of the research award for Sharon Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.
For more information on the network and how to get involved, please take a look at our website:
https://easaonline.org/networks/antart/
Art has always occupied an ambivalent position in anthropology; it has been subject to both fascination and scepticism. Alfred Gell went as far as positing that anthropology is essentially anti-art, advocating instead a ‘methodological philistinism’ and ‘resolute indifference’ in our study of modern and contemporary art. Aesthetics has often been questioned as a Western, Bourgeois construct. The anthropology of art historically departed from this paradoxical, iconoclastic rejection of art practice and in particular, art theory. In this workshop, we want to explore the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and reassess the role of art within the discipline. What is the trouble with art in anthropology? Our aim is to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the theoretical problems of anthropology, and a critical discipline of contemporary societies. The symposium is open to both senior and early-career scholars who are planning or conducting projects in the anthropology of art.
WHEN: Saturday-Sunday, 21-22 September 2019
WHERE: Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)
FORMAT: The Symposium will be composed of panels with 20-minute paper presentations, and roundtables with less formalized discussion inputs. Please indicate in your email to which format you wish to propose an idea. Panels and roundtables will then be formed based on the themes and submissions. We also welcome film, photo, or other media submissions as long as they respond to the theme and are within the time-frame of 20-minutes.
SUBMISSION: Please send your proposals (including a title and abstract of 250 words max and a short bio) to BOTH convenors by the DEADLINE of 31 March 2019. Contact details: Roger Sansi (rogersansi@ub.edu) & Jonas Tinius (jonas.tinius@hu-berlin.de)
The Network has a limited amount of supporting budget that can contribute towards accommodation costs for speakers. We acknowledge as sources of this funding the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museum and Heritage (CARMAH). The Centre is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as part of the research award for Sharon Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.
For more information on the network and how to get involved, please take a look at our website:
https://easaonline.org/networks/antart/
Research Interests:
This panel proposes to examine utopia and temporalities through that which is left in the dark: the ruined, the overlooked, the uncanonical. What is the generative potential of the dystopian, peripheral-those sites, practices, and ideas... more
This panel proposes to examine utopia and temporalities through that which is left in the dark: the ruined, the overlooked, the uncanonical. What is the generative potential of the dystopian, peripheral-those sites, practices, and ideas left in the shadows of the present?
Responses to global challenges, social change, and utopian visions seldom focus on the shadowy, unseen, or dystopian. We value and aspire to trajectories of progress, clarity, and (decolonial) struggles against oppression and for recognition. But what about the ambivalence of light and the potential of the opaque? This panel highlights anthropological perspectives on unassuming visionaries, micro-utopias, and phantom agencies across the fields of art, heritage, and material culture. Drawing on ethnographic field-research, we wish to juxtapose different considerations of lesser-known, peripheral, or unlikely visionary potential for crafting responses to global challenges. We are interested in the ambivalent potentials and dynamics between light and shadow in the context of art, heritage, and materiality. What happens when counter-hegemonic perspectives become normative; when the uncanonical is suddenly in the spotlight? How are sites, stories, and ideals about heritage and materiality pulled back into the shadow and made to appear illegitimate? Being in the light implies confrontation with visibility, normativity, and intelligibility-and thus not necessarily the most suitable conditions for visionary perspectives on sociality and futurity. We thus want to consider the diverse potentials and ambivalences that lie in the blurry indeterminacy of the shadow: possibilities arising from marginalised and dark materialities in urban regeneration; revisionist nostalgias feeding into old/new exclusionary political dystopias; or artistic practices revelling in dark pasts and dystopian presents. For this panel, we invite proposals exploring the idea of shadows of the present in relation to ethnographic research on art, heritage, and materiality.
Responses to global challenges, social change, and utopian visions seldom focus on the shadowy, unseen, or dystopian. We value and aspire to trajectories of progress, clarity, and (decolonial) struggles against oppression and for recognition. But what about the ambivalence of light and the potential of the opaque? This panel highlights anthropological perspectives on unassuming visionaries, micro-utopias, and phantom agencies across the fields of art, heritage, and material culture. Drawing on ethnographic field-research, we wish to juxtapose different considerations of lesser-known, peripheral, or unlikely visionary potential for crafting responses to global challenges. We are interested in the ambivalent potentials and dynamics between light and shadow in the context of art, heritage, and materiality. What happens when counter-hegemonic perspectives become normative; when the uncanonical is suddenly in the spotlight? How are sites, stories, and ideals about heritage and materiality pulled back into the shadow and made to appear illegitimate? Being in the light implies confrontation with visibility, normativity, and intelligibility-and thus not necessarily the most suitable conditions for visionary perspectives on sociality and futurity. We thus want to consider the diverse potentials and ambivalences that lie in the blurry indeterminacy of the shadow: possibilities arising from marginalised and dark materialities in urban regeneration; revisionist nostalgias feeding into old/new exclusionary political dystopias; or artistic practices revelling in dark pasts and dystopian presents. For this panel, we invite proposals exploring the idea of shadows of the present in relation to ethnographic research on art, heritage, and materiality.
Research Interests:
In recent years and especially across European postcolonial contexts, the renaming, reform, and even reconstruction of anthropological museums is embedded within and reinforced by a fierce debate about the legitimacy, location, and... more
In recent years and especially across European postcolonial contexts, the renaming, reform, and even reconstruction of anthropological museums is embedded within and reinforced by a fierce debate about the legitimacy, location, and expertise for anthropological representation. This has led to what we describe as a post-anthropological moment in which anthropology becomes problematised beyond itself. Inflected by our own research of these developments in anthropological museums, and their convergences with contemporary art and debates on colonialism in Europe, we have witnessed and been struck by the extent to which both anthropology as a discipline (including its history and institutions, such as museums and archives) and themes traditionally associated with it have become central topics of discussion beyond the discipline's institutional confines. We have identified three areas of debate-current transformations of anthropological museums, contemporary art, and post-colonial critique-that have arguably become the most productive and vibrant 'post-anthropological' fields. We take the tension implied in the 'post' not to represent a crisis of identity for anthropology, but a productive moment that may open up new ways of negotiating anthropological representation beyond itself. This debate is thus not just one within anthropology, but also and perhaps more significantly, about the elsewhere and otherwise of anthropology. The discussion on the post-anthropological is situated in current debates in museum studies, anthropology, and curatorial studies as well as linking discussions on colonial legacies with those on contemporary art. We seek contributions which respond to and challenge the notion of the 'post-anthropological' and the fields and debates associated with it: current transformations of anthropological museums, contemporary art, and post-colonial critique. We are particularly interested in case studies and observations, historic and contemporary, from outside of Europe. Please send your abstract of 250 words (max) to the convenors Margareta von Oswald (margareta.von.oswald@hu-berlin.de) and Jonas Tinius (jonas.tinius@hu-berlin.de) by 29 March 2019.
Research Interests:
In recent years and especially across European postcolonial contexts, the renaming, reform, and even reconstruction of anthropological museums is embedded within and reinforced by a fierce broader debate about the legitimacy, location,... more
In recent years and especially across European postcolonial contexts, the renaming, reform, and even reconstruction of anthropological museums is embedded within and reinforced by a fierce broader debate about the legitimacy, location, and expertise of anthropology itself. This 'climate' is marked by multivocal struggles including challenges to the institutions of anthropology from within, as well as by different communities and (indigenous) activists. Fundamentally, therefore, particularly regarding issues of restitution and ownership, this debate is not just about institutional change, but about transnational and transcultural reparation, repair, and justice. These climates of change have, however, also facilitated new kinds of collaborations and translations, such as between museums and artists, activists and scholars, that have, we observe, taken the debate about the legitimacy of anthropology beyond itself. In this panel, we interrogate the meaning and consequences of this, as we call it, 'post-anthropological' dynamic. Inflected by our own research of these developments in anthropological museums, and their convergences with contemporary art and debates on colonialism in Europe, we have observed that three areas of debate-current transformations of anthropological museums, contemporary art, and postcolonial critique-have arguably become the most productive and vibrant 'post-anthropological' fields. We take the tension implied in the 'post' not to represent a crisis of identity for anthropology, but a productive moment that may open up new ways of negotiating anthropological representation beyond itself. This debate is thus not just one within anthropology, but also and perhaps more significantly, about the elsewhere and otherwise of anthropology. The discussion on the post-anthropological is situated in current debates in museum studies, anthropology, and curatorial studies as well as linking discussions on colonial legacies with those on contemporary art. This panel responds to and challenges the notion of the 'post-anthropological' and the fields and debates associated with it: current transformations of anthropological museums, contemporary art, and post-colonial critique. It does so in particular by exploring case studies, both contemporary and historic, that extend this debate beyond European institutions and fields. In particular-and by way of a discussion led by Anthony Shelton (director of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC), we link these debates on the post-anthropological grappling with the legacies of the European colonial project with the changing climates in Canadian, Indian, and South Pacific contexts. These contributions also reflect on the ongoing struggles, and the limits as well as possibilities, afforded by calls for the decolonisation of anthropology and its related institutions.
Co-sponsored by: Council for Museum Anthropology and Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Co-sponsored by: Council for Museum Anthropology and Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Research Interests: Anthropology, Museum Studies, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Colonialism, and 13 moreHistory of Museums, Anthropology Of Art, Indigeneity, Post-Colonialism, Curating, Curatorial Studies and Practice, Curatorial Practice (Art), Cultural Anthropology, Vancouver, History of Exhibitions, American Anthropological Association, Museums of Anthropology, and American Anthropologist
The Anthropology and the Arts Network (ANTART) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), convened by Roger Sansi (Barcelona) and myself, is holding its first interim event on 21-22 September 2019 in Berlin. The... more
The Anthropology and the Arts Network (ANTART) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), convened by Roger Sansi (Barcelona) and myself, is holding its first interim event on 21-22 September 2019 in Berlin.
The Trouble with Art: Philistinism, Iconoclasm, and Scepticism explores the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and reassesses the role of art within the discipline. Our aim is to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the core theoretical problems of anthropology, also in terms of its public political role as a critical science and discipline of contemporary (European) societies.
We are convening at my host institution, the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) in the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie - HU Berlin Berlin of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which kindly supports the event via the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation alongside EASA. The meeting is open to the public, but we ask you to register with the convenors if you intend to attend.
The Trouble with Art: Philistinism, Iconoclasm, and Scepticism explores the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and reassesses the role of art within the discipline. Our aim is to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the core theoretical problems of anthropology, also in terms of its public political role as a critical science and discipline of contemporary (European) societies.
We are convening at my host institution, the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) in the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie - HU Berlin Berlin of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which kindly supports the event via the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation alongside EASA. The meeting is open to the public, but we ask you to register with the convenors if you intend to attend.
Research Interests:
2019 Symposium of the Anthropology and the Arts EASA Network (ANTART) Art has always occupied an ambivalent position in anthropology; it has been subject to both fascination and scepticism. Alfred Gell went as far as positing that... more
2019 Symposium of the Anthropology and the Arts EASA Network (ANTART)
Art has always occupied an ambivalent position in anthropology; it has been subject to both fascination and scepticism. Alfred Gell went as far as positing that anthropology is essentially anti-art, advocating instead a ‘methodological philistinism’ and ‘resolute indifference’ in our study of modern and contemporary art. Aesthetics has often been questioned as a Western, Bourgeois construct. The anthropology of art historically departed from this paradoxical, iconoclastic rejection of art practice and in particular, art theory. In this workshop, we want to explore the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and reassess the role of art within the discipline. What is the trouble with art in anthropology? Our aim is to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the theoretical problems of anthropology, and a critical discipline of contemporary societies. The symposium is open to both senior and early-career scholars who are planning or conducting projects in the anthropology of art.
Art has always occupied an ambivalent position in anthropology; it has been subject to both fascination and scepticism. Alfred Gell went as far as positing that anthropology is essentially anti-art, advocating instead a ‘methodological philistinism’ and ‘resolute indifference’ in our study of modern and contemporary art. Aesthetics has often been questioned as a Western, Bourgeois construct. The anthropology of art historically departed from this paradoxical, iconoclastic rejection of art practice and in particular, art theory. In this workshop, we want to explore the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and reassess the role of art within the discipline. What is the trouble with art in anthropology? Our aim is to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the theoretical problems of anthropology, and a critical discipline of contemporary societies. The symposium is open to both senior and early-career scholars who are planning or conducting projects in the anthropology of art.
Research Interests:
On the north-eastern tip of Berlin's famous museum island, Germany's most contested cultural project is nearing completion : the Humboldt Forum. Framed by a reconstructed feudal architecture of the Hohenzollern dynasty, it aspires to be... more
On the north-eastern tip of Berlin's famous museum island, Germany's most contested cultural project is nearing completion : the Humboldt Forum. Framed by a reconstructed feudal architecture of the Hohenzollern dynasty, it aspires to be not just the city's, but indeed Germany's principal " international dialogue platform for global ideas " of non-European heritage. Amidst heavy criticism from civil rights organisations, postcolonial activists, and contemporary artists, the Forum clings to mediating its popular Humboldtian vision and version of exploration as a form of curious wanderlust. This paper traces some of the developments of how the Humboldt Forum and its constituent partners mediate and sek to popularise visions of the two Humboldt brothers as visionary explorers, rather than exoticising colonialists. Further, I shall be examining the tension between popular material tourist culture, new media and technological projections of the project's visions of non-European heritage, and postcolonial challenges levelled against these. This talk draws on multi-researcher fieldwork conducted as part of the Centre for Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Humboldt-University in Berlin.
Research Interests:
Mit dem Ausdruck «Deep Hanging Out» betitelte der amerikani- sche Anthropologe Cli ord Geertz (1926–2006) einst einen Artikel in der New York Review of Books (1998). So augenzwinkernd und unwissenschaftlich die Bezeichnung des... more
Mit dem Ausdruck «Deep Hanging Out» betitelte der amerikani- sche Anthropologe Cli ord Geertz (1926–2006) einst einen Artikel in der New York Review of Books (1998). So augenzwinkernd und unwissenschaftlich die Bezeichnung des «tiefgründigen Herumhängens» klingen mag, so weitreichend war die damit verbundene Kritik an der damaligen Praxis der Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie. Dem etablierten Dispositiv des wissenschaftlichen Ethnografen, der gekonnt in fremde Kulturen eintaucht, dort lange lebt und diese objektiv beschreibt, setzt das «deep hanging out» die Subjektivität, Unplanbarkeit und Kontingenz anthropologischer Beschreibung entgegen. Feldforschung ndet eben nicht mehr im Dschungel und im Zelt und mit der überheblichen Rhetorik des Wissenschaftlers statt, wie es Renato Rosaldo kritisierte, sondern in Bars und Straßenecken, Museen und Vernissagen, mit anderen Menschen und nicht nur über sie.
Clifford Geertz will mit dem Begri des «deep hanging out» die notwendige Dezentrierung der Autorität des Anthropologen unterstreichen, dessen Einblicke immer partiell bleiben müssen. Geertz spricht gar von einer Fundamentalkritik der epistemischen Illusion und Arroganz anthropologischer Objektivität. Aber inwiefern erlaubt das neugierige «Herumhängen» und die Re exion neuer anthropologische Forschungsansätze ein anderes Schreiben, Sprechen und Denken über zeitgenössische Kunst und Theater? Welche Einblicke ermöglichen diese originellen Formen der ergebniso enen, exiblen und langfristigen Forschung? Lassen sich solche Methoden auch in theaterwissenschaftliche oder kuratorische Forschung einbinden?
Ausgehend von langjähriger anthropologischer Forschung mit Stadttheatern, freien darstellenden Theaterkollektiven und Ku- ratorInnen zeitgenössischer Kunst in Deutschland stellt dieser Vortrag die Besonderheiten ethnogra scher Methoden zur Diskussion und fragt, inwiefern sie auch neue künstlerischer und theoretische Ver echtungen von künstlerischer Praxis, Theaterwissenschaft und Anthropologie provozieren können.
Clifford Geertz will mit dem Begri des «deep hanging out» die notwendige Dezentrierung der Autorität des Anthropologen unterstreichen, dessen Einblicke immer partiell bleiben müssen. Geertz spricht gar von einer Fundamentalkritik der epistemischen Illusion und Arroganz anthropologischer Objektivität. Aber inwiefern erlaubt das neugierige «Herumhängen» und die Re exion neuer anthropologische Forschungsansätze ein anderes Schreiben, Sprechen und Denken über zeitgenössische Kunst und Theater? Welche Einblicke ermöglichen diese originellen Formen der ergebniso enen, exiblen und langfristigen Forschung? Lassen sich solche Methoden auch in theaterwissenschaftliche oder kuratorische Forschung einbinden?
Ausgehend von langjähriger anthropologischer Forschung mit Stadttheatern, freien darstellenden Theaterkollektiven und Ku- ratorInnen zeitgenössischer Kunst in Deutschland stellt dieser Vortrag die Besonderheiten ethnogra scher Methoden zur Diskussion und fragt, inwiefern sie auch neue künstlerischer und theoretische Ver echtungen von künstlerischer Praxis, Theaterwissenschaft und Anthropologie provozieren können.
Research Interests:
In this talk, I discuss the negotiation of space, heritage, and notions of difference in contemporary Berlin. My presentation is based on research conducted as part of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation funded project Making... more
In this talk, I discuss the negotiation of space, heritage, and notions of difference in contemporary Berlin. My presentation is based on research conducted as part of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation funded project Making Differences in Berlin: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century, based in the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and directed by Prof Sharon Macdonald. Against the backdrop of contentious (ethnological) museum projects in the city, most notably the Humboldt-Forum, my research explores how Berlin-based curators, contemporary artists, and art institutions reflect on and negotiate notions of alterity and diversity through their critical curatorial strategies and projects. As part of this study, I am developing collaborative methods to follow the exhibition making and curatorial planning in these spaces, exploring the boundaries and productive intersections of ethnographic, artistic, and curatorial work as well as the relations between art and anthropology more generally. Before my presentation, we are also briefly speaking about aspects of my previous doctoral research, for which I conducted an ethnography of a contemporary German public theatre in the postindustrial Ruhrvalley in the West of the country. I followed the daily workings of this institution, especially the practice of rehearsing, focusing on how centuries-old German public traditions of self-formation (Bildung) through art have influenced theatres in the country. I analysed the pervasiveness of ideas of self-formation with regard to the logic of state-funding for the arts in Germany, but also studied how this tradition of Bildung brought about and affected a set of artistic values common across the German theatre system revolving around questions of autonomy, the individual, and self-cultivation.
Social Anthropology Seminar Monday, 13th November 2017 Dr Jonas Tinius – Humboldt University of Berlin
http://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:ow8-j7q93k6z-9c37z7
Social Anthropology Seminar Monday, 13th November 2017 Dr Jonas Tinius – Humboldt University of Berlin
http://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:ow8-j7q93k6z-9c37z7
Research Interests: Anthropology, Ethics, Museum Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, and 12 moreUrban Anthropology, History of Museums, Performance, Museology, Ethnography of urban spaces, Anthropology of ethics and morality, Berlin, Humboldt-Forum, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, Anthropology of the City, Critical Museology, and Critical Museum Studies
In my talk, I would primarily like to propose two reflections: First, that we can see art (both art theory and art practice), but especially art institutions and organisations, as prisms for understanding wider aspects of society today.... more
In my talk, I would primarily like to propose two reflections:
First, that we can see art (both art theory and art practice), but especially art institutions and organisations, as prisms for understanding wider aspects of society today. Art institutions, organisations, but also art networks never exist in a vacuum: they organise labour, they issue contracts – they receive funding and distribute it – and they are embedded in local as well as wider political structures. In short, art institutions refract different social dynamics.
The second reflection I would like to dwell on concerns the practice of observation -, in particular the observation of art. More specifically, I would like to reflect on the growing interest among artists in ethnographic methods and in the integration of external observers into their practices. What I would like to think about today is the role of anthropological observation as a specific genre of observation and its potential political value for artistic productions.
First, that we can see art (both art theory and art practice), but especially art institutions and organisations, as prisms for understanding wider aspects of society today. Art institutions, organisations, but also art networks never exist in a vacuum: they organise labour, they issue contracts – they receive funding and distribute it – and they are embedded in local as well as wider political structures. In short, art institutions refract different social dynamics.
The second reflection I would like to dwell on concerns the practice of observation -, in particular the observation of art. More specifically, I would like to reflect on the growing interest among artists in ethnographic methods and in the integration of external observers into their practices. What I would like to think about today is the role of anthropological observation as a specific genre of observation and its potential political value for artistic productions.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, German Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, and 16 moreSocial Sciences, Theatre History, Ethnography, Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Collaboration, Reflexivity, Institutional Theory, Theater and film, Avant-Garde Theater, Performance, Work and Labour, Cultural Anthropology, German Theatre, Theatre, and Postfordism
Aufbauend auf der Beobachtung, dass die postfordistische Arbeitswelt und dessen arbeitende Subjekte durch ästhetisierte Kreativitätsdispositive gekennzeichnet sind (Boltanski/Chiapello 1999; Reckwitz 2012), skizziert dieser Vortrag eine... more
Aufbauend auf der Beobachtung, dass die postfordistische Arbeitswelt und dessen arbeitende Subjekte durch ästhetisierte Kreativitätsdispositive gekennzeichnet sind (Boltanski/Chiapello 1999; Reckwitz 2012), skizziert dieser Vortrag eine weitere Dimension postfordistischer Arbeitsverhältnisse, die leider häufig bloß anekdotisch erwähnt wird: Die Beziehung des Künstlers zu seiner Arbeit. Genauer gesagt, die Beziehung von Künstlern zu Aspekten ihrer Arbeit, die als prototypisch für das flexible und kreative „unternehmerische Selbst“ (Bröckling 2007) stehen. Dazu zählt vor allem die authentische und selbstbestimmte Organisation der Arbeit, die Autonomie (hierzu gehört auch der Begriff der Flexibilität), sowie die Projektarbeit. Einer der interessantesten Dimensionen dieser zentralen Aspekte künstlerischer sowie postfordistischer Arbeitsmodalitäten ist hier meiner Meinung nach die Ambivalenz der Begriffe und Praktiken: Selbstorganisation, Autonomie, Flexibilität und Projektarbeit stellen eben zugleich politische und soziale Errungenschaften künstlerischer Arbeit dar, sowie oftmals ungewollte Beiträge zur ökonomischen Prekarität.
Ästhetisierung der Arbeit – Kulturanalysen des kognitiven Kapitalismus
17. Arbeitstagung der dgv-Kommission Arbeitskulturen
24.-26. September 2015, Uniforum Heussallee, Bonn
Ästhetisierung der Arbeit – Kulturanalysen des kognitiven Kapitalismus
17. Arbeitstagung der dgv-Kommission Arbeitskulturen
24.-26. September 2015, Uniforum Heussallee, Bonn
Research Interests: Art History, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Sociology of Work, Art, and 13 moreSocial Sciences, Art Theory, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, Sociology of Arts, Labour Studies, Sociology of Art, Work and Labour, German Theatre, Theatre, The Anthropology of Drama and Theatre, and Soziale Arbeit
This paper explores the intersection of moral, legal, and aesthetic dilemmas in the Gurlitt case. It proposes 'ethico-aesthetic patronage' as a helpful analytical and ethnographic entry point for an analysis of art works as relational... more
This paper explores the intersection of moral, legal, and aesthetic dilemmas in the Gurlitt case. It proposes 'ethico-aesthetic patronage' as a helpful analytical and ethnographic entry point for an analysis of art works as relational prism.
'Gurlitt' has already become a scenario word for one of the most notorious cases of art history after World War II. It concerns, initially, the inherited collection of 1,406 art works stored for over thirty years in an apartment in the Munich district of Schwabing. The 'Gurlitt case' is a prism for a nexus of hitherto not unrelated but rarely ever so intertwined (art) historical, moral, political, and economic conundrums. Throughout this paper, I wish to attend to the interlocking of these aspects, casting an anthropological glance at the German cultural historical background to and implications of this case. Key to my discussion is the relation between aesthetic experience and ethical judgement.
'Gurlitt' has already become a scenario word for one of the most notorious cases of art history after World War II. It concerns, initially, the inherited collection of 1,406 art works stored for over thirty years in an apartment in the Munich district of Schwabing. The 'Gurlitt case' is a prism for a nexus of hitherto not unrelated but rarely ever so intertwined (art) historical, moral, political, and economic conundrums. Throughout this paper, I wish to attend to the interlocking of these aspects, casting an anthropological glance at the German cultural historical background to and implications of this case. Key to my discussion is the relation between aesthetic experience and ethical judgement.
Research Interests:
My interest in the Theater an der Ruhr and my aim with this paper is twofold: On a first, descriptive level, I would like to explore the emergence of a specific and possibly unique public-private theatre institution and the... more
My interest in the Theater an der Ruhr and my aim with this paper is twofold: On a first, descriptive level, I would like to explore the emergence of a specific and possibly unique public-private theatre institution and the ethico-aesthetic reasoning and cultural political negotiations underlying it. On a second, analytical level, I would like to suggest that there is a particular merit in taking seriously conceptions the function of charismatic authority when considering institutionalized artistic practices not just but specifically in an arguably post-Fordist era where institutions and authorities seem to play a lesser role (see Gielen 2013, Matzke 2012, Mouffe 2013).
Research Interests:
Some scholars have argued that human reflexivity, i.e. how we reflect upon ourselves and our concerns in relation to society, occurs through 'internal conversations' or 'inner dialogue' using language, but also emotions, sensations, and... more
Some scholars have argued that human reflexivity, i.e. how we reflect upon ourselves and our concerns in relation to society, occurs through 'internal conversations' or 'inner dialogue' using language, but also emotions, sensations, and images. Others suggested that institutional forms of social organisation (such as artistic institutions) shape and causally explain thought styles, i.e. how people categories, think, feel, etc. In this paper, I would like to counter both of these propositions and propose to ask and try to answer the questions: First, how do social groups reflect upon themselves and their role in society not only in their minds, but also hrough and by means of institutions? Second, how do such groups transform existing institutional structures to fit their particular requirements for reflexivity and critique? Third, what forms of institutions exist outside the neoliberal vs. state subsidised dichotomy and how can they illuminate crucial discussions on current forms of labour organisation in the performing arts and the role of resistance in or despite institutionalised structures?
The way I shall go about answering this question is by recourse to 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with the German Thea er an der Ruhr in the postindustrial Ruhrvalley. I hope to discuss how this theatre has created a new artistic model different from that of the city-theatre by focussing on two central practices: extensive rehearsals and creative labour processes on the one hand and travel and international collaborations on the other hand. I will argue, in short, that the theatre institution I studied reflec ed and served creative work processes and not vice versa. In this sense, the theatre institution has become the product of and the means by which artistic reflection takes place. The Theater an der Ruhr, as an institution, has thus been put on trial (auf die Probe gestellt).
The way I shall go about answering this question is by recourse to 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with the German Thea er an der Ruhr in the postindustrial Ruhrvalley. I hope to discuss how this theatre has created a new artistic model different from that of the city-theatre by focussing on two central practices: extensive rehearsals and creative labour processes on the one hand and travel and international collaborations on the other hand. I will argue, in short, that the theatre institution I studied reflec ed and served creative work processes and not vice versa. In this sense, the theatre institution has become the product of and the means by which artistic reflection takes place. The Theater an der Ruhr, as an institution, has thus been put on trial (auf die Probe gestellt).
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After demonstrating students disrupted his 1969 Frankfurt lectures, Adorno rejected active solidarity: "Philosophy cannot recommend immediate measures. Its transformative potential remains its insistence on theory. Is it not a form of... more
After demonstrating students disrupted his 1969 Frankfurt lectures, Adorno rejected active solidarity: "Philosophy cannot recommend immediate measures. Its transformative potential remains its insistence on theory. Is it not a form of resistance to think? Is not theory a genuine appearance (Gestalt) of practice?" Inspired by such fundamental concerns, I discuss a site-specific theatre project in an abandoned multi-storey asylum camp which problematised the memories, aspirations, and anxieties of relocated refugees in the postindustrial German Ruhr valley. I accompanied this project as part of my anthropological fieldwork on the post-Brechtian tradition and intercultural philosophy of the Theater an der Ruhr under whose aegis and patronage the refugee project was realised. In this paper, I explore the young Turkish project director's self-disciplined and self-reflected form of theatre practice which, while grounded in his directorial authority, emphasised theatre-immanent thought-processes. I discuss the intricacies of the extensive rehearsal process to reveal the intense interweaving of aesthetic, ethical, and political dilemmas, asking more widely: What constitutes reflected action on stage? Can we conceptualise autonomy and subjectivity in the context of unequal power relations? What are the issues in distinguishing between applied pedagogical and principally ethico-aesthetic theatre practice?
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In Germany and several other European countries, dramaturgs have been official employees of state-funded theatres. They have served as text-advisors, translators, publishers, researchers, ideologues, philosophers. Yet, as Jan Kott's... more
In Germany and several other European countries, dramaturgs have been official employees of state-funded theatres. They have served as text-advisors, translators, publishers, researchers, ideologues, philosophers. Yet, as Jan Kott's famous caricature piece "The Dramaturg" (1990) explores, the role and function of the dramaturg has remained clouded in misunderstanding, remaining for many "a mysterious creature", somewhere between "reader-cum-literary advisor revisor, and literary manager" (Tayler 1966). Drawing on Mary Luckhurst's study (Dramaturgy, 2003) of Bertolt Brecht's institutionalised role as mediator between theory and practice, writing and analysis, theatre historian and contemporary critic, philosopher and politician, actor and audience, I advance a case-study of dramaturgical theory and practice at the Western German Theater an der Ruhr. Having conducted ethnographic fieldwork with this institution, I base my exploration on Helmut Schäfer's dramaturgical conceptions on archival research, participant observation, and conversations. Schäfer (2011) put forward a conception of dramaturgical reflection that suggested it advances a performative "autonomous zone" that goes beyond textual templates. In the process of a play's production, he suggests, emerges a multiple authorship within the theatre understood as collective artistic institution. Dramaturgy is therefore not a "translation workshop" or a "branch of literary studies". Theatre must not submit itself, he writes, to an extra-aesthetic reasoning. Dramaturgical reflection has the task to advance artistic autonomy by sustaining the contingency of its process. In this presentation, I explore the consequences, implications, and implementations of such a view, suggesting that it provides an argument for the self-reflexive, self-transcending potential of a theatre tradition to produce autonomous aesthetic theory and socio-political practice.
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By December 2013, almost eight million people in Germany held non-German citizenship, marking the highest total population in any EU member state. Given Germany’s well-known complicated past, however, its relation to immigration remains... more
By December 2013, almost eight million people in Germany held non-German citizenship, marking the highest total population in any EU member state. Given Germany’s well-known complicated past, however, its relation to immigration remains uneasy. This paper looks at some of the practical and aesthetic experiences of a specific group of immigrants in Germany: asylum seekers and refugees in the country’s structurally most disadvantaged region, the West German Ruhr area. Formerly the country’s industrial heartland, the region now bears the burden of some of Germany’s most heavily indebted municipalities, such as Oberhausen – dubbed ‘Germany’s Detroit’, where postwar wasteland and high unemployment rates outweigh nostalgic rejuvenation campaigns based on long-gone pioneering industries.
During my recent doctoral fieldwork, I accompanied a young Turkish director who developed Ruhrorter, an eight-months state-funded theatre project with refugees and asylum seekers from Oberhausen. Cooperating with a local theatre renowned for its exchanges with artists from war-torn world regions, his project temporarily transformed an abandoned multi-storey emergency refugee camp in the commercial industrial part of Duisburg called Ruhrorter (place by the Ruhr) into a theatre and installation venue. Complicated by participants’ deportations during production phases, the group lived through several crises, exposing the precariousness of performers’ existence as what the project conceptualized as ‘temporary citizens’ (Bürger auf Zeit) and their emotional struggle to conceive of normality after the extreme events of forced migration and asylum appeals.
This paper highlights how the theatre project prompted participants to reflect through their imaginative artistic work on the ways in which their legally imposed status as refugees structure their experience of space and time. My argument is that the project conceptualized the legal status of a refugee as a precarious temporality.
During my recent doctoral fieldwork, I accompanied a young Turkish director who developed Ruhrorter, an eight-months state-funded theatre project with refugees and asylum seekers from Oberhausen. Cooperating with a local theatre renowned for its exchanges with artists from war-torn world regions, his project temporarily transformed an abandoned multi-storey emergency refugee camp in the commercial industrial part of Duisburg called Ruhrorter (place by the Ruhr) into a theatre and installation venue. Complicated by participants’ deportations during production phases, the group lived through several crises, exposing the precariousness of performers’ existence as what the project conceptualized as ‘temporary citizens’ (Bürger auf Zeit) and their emotional struggle to conceive of normality after the extreme events of forced migration and asylum appeals.
This paper highlights how the theatre project prompted participants to reflect through their imaginative artistic work on the ways in which their legally imposed status as refugees structure their experience of space and time. My argument is that the project conceptualized the legal status of a refugee as a precarious temporality.
Research Interests: German Studies, Theatre Studies, Social Anthropology, Political Theory, Performance Studies, and 16 moreRefugee Studies, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Migration, Performance Art, Philosophy Of Law, Giorgio Agamben, Migration Studies, Urban Sociology, Political theatre, German Theatre, Citizenship, Documentary, Temporality, Cities, and Risk and crisis management
Just over a hundred years ago, the Coburg Court Theatre laws determined that a new play should not be rehearsed more than three times. As J. W. von Goethe, who was directing the Weimar Court theatre at the turn of the 19th century put it,... more
Just over a hundred years ago, the Coburg Court Theatre laws determined that a new play should not be rehearsed more than three times. As J. W. von Goethe, who was directing the Weimar Court theatre at the turn of the 19th century put it, too frequent rehearsals could lead nonprofessional actors into a ‘cycle of uniform and steadily repeated activity leading to nothing.’ In German public theatres today, we see almost the reverse. Actors rehearse performances according to directors’ aesthetic decisions for as long as 9 months. In this presentation, by recourse to my ethnographic fieldwork with a professional German theatre institution in Germany’s postindustrial Ruhr valley, I explore how scenes are rehearsed, studied, and prepared during rehearsals by cultivating the right kind of conduct and posture (Ger. Haltung) required for scenes on stage. I argue that scenes on and beyond the stage are made through actors’ cultivation of Haltung and that an ethnographic attention to rehearsals can provide fruitful insight into the locus and modus for the ‘making of a scene’.
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To this day, descriptions of contemporary artistic creation are shrouded in fables and legends of autodidacticism, innate gift, and sacred talent. Yet, for centuries, artists have been relying on their work and works for survival: they... more
To this day, descriptions of contemporary artistic creation are shrouded in fables and legends of autodidacticism, innate gift, and sacred talent. Yet, for centuries, artists have been relying on their work and works for survival: they have been professional labourers in economies around the world much like bakers, bankers, and teachers. According to sociological accounts, artists have failed to be recognised as professional workers because their lifestyles posed counter-examples to institutionally-based, nine-to-five jobs. Artistic labour can also less easily be quantified, and assessing the quality of the ‘resulting’ works will always remain as much a subject of qualified debate as it will be one of taste. However, scholars of contemporary forms of capitalism have observed that the characteristics of artistic labour – flexible, unquantifiability, creativity-driven processes – have not just been encompassed, but become the epitome of contemporary so-called post-Fordist labour relations. This talk builds on ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary German theatre producers and artists to discuss some of the complexities of the relation between artistic work and creative economies today.
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This paper responds to developments in the sociological and social anthropological study of art, art traditions, and art institutions. I suggest that a new sociology of art (with an ethnographic stance) could benefit from greater... more
This paper responds to developments in the sociological and social anthropological study of art, art traditions, and art institutions. I suggest that a new sociology of art (with an ethnographic stance) could benefit from greater attention to the construction of facts and agents, frames of reference, and spheres of practice. This paper advances the perspective that attending to the ways in which artists create documents, theories, and aesthetics, make them meaningful, and translate them into practice within artistic institutions, could be a way of taking their activities seriously as ‘network-effects’ (albeit with transformative potential) in themselves. By examining the conceptual-short cuts used by artists in their practices and interaction with each other and audiences we might avoid denigrating theory as either 'below' or 'above' practice and integrate it into a social scientific study of art. I exemplify this argument with recourse to dramaturgical reflexion at the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim in the West of Germany.
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A central notion for disciplinary engagement with performance is that of ‘tradition’ – a concept central to questions of authority, knowledge, and reperformance. While the term seems to suggest the static, and the emphasis on reiteration,... more
A central notion for disciplinary engagement with performance is that of ‘tradition’ – a concept central to questions of authority, knowledge, and reperformance. While the term seems to suggest the static, and the emphasis on reiteration, I suggest that the anthropological study of traditions, and performative traditions has found great inspiration in such seeming paradoxa as ‘The Invention of Tradition’. In fact, I suggest, the anthropological study of performative traditions has been centrally about ‘the innovation, the event, or the agency that is possible, or made possible through traditions’. Anthropological engagements with performance traditions can be read in ways that yield ideas about the invention of performances, or even culture and society.
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This paper discusses this polemic in the context of recent struggles and internal dynamics of cultural critique between the so-called ‘free theatre scene’ and traditional state-funded institutions in Germany and situates it in the legacy... more
This paper discusses this polemic in the context of recent struggles and internal dynamics of cultural critique between the so-called ‘free theatre scene’ and traditional state-funded institutions in Germany and situates it in the legacy of postwar intellectual engagement with the fascist legacy of the German state and the role of culture. I discuss the ways in which the German public theatre tradition and German notions of cultural patronage reveal facets of a resilient struggle that revolve around the understanding of the German state as patron of culture and of art as a ‘resonance body’ for the crisis of society.
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The perspective I would like to offer for debate with this paper looks at the practice and theory of a theatre group, the German 'Theater an der Ruhr' for which communication between different cultural landscapes through theatrical... more
The perspective I would like to offer for debate with this paper looks at the practice and theory of a theatre group, the German 'Theater an der Ruhr' for which communication between different cultural landscapes through theatrical commentary has become a form of reflexive, collective, social transformation. By analyzing material on this group’s extensive international travel project, the 'international theaterlandscapes', I would like to ask: What value do we add by attending to the self-ascribed transformative potential of theatre and performance? How can we grasp the ways in which certain aspects of theatre-making are not merely means to an end, but themselves venues and avenues for an enquiry into sociality, self and other-formation, and the evaluation of ‘good’ life?