2012 Border Aesthetics Conference

Culture panel:

Friday, September 7: 1300-1430 at room E-0101

• Participants: Knut Erik Jensen (filmmaker), Liv Lundberg (poet), Liv-Hanne Haugen (dance artist), and Luba Kuzovnikova (artist collective Pikene på Broen)

Participation in keynotes, culture panel, and artistic presentation is open to all and does not require registration.

There is a “border aesthetics” group on facebook and a twitter presence (@bordaesth) – if you want to tweet about the conference, use the #bordaesth tag

Scope of conference:

This conference will investigate how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting aesthetic practices. In so doing, it draws upon two guiding observations that must inform any notion of a border aesthetics, these being a) that aesthetic theories and practices regularly invoke and engage with notions of the border; and b) that borders are in turn capable of producing aesthetic effects and can themselves be conceived of as aesthetic objects. Papers can focus on the literature, film, photography, visual design, urban planning, and video art to name but a few examples. Also work produced by creative artists working in or imagining border regions will be welcomed. In particular, the Barents Region and the Mediterranean are important areas of study but we also will consider – and encourage – investigations of other regions.

Our concentration on border regions enables the Conference not only to explore and develop further the relatively new field of migratory aesthetics, but it will also formulate what might provisionally be called a zonal aesthetics. Indeed, one of its principal goals will be precisely to establish how a new ‘aesthetics of space’ of a kind likely to be required by the study of the divergent groups, objects, values and activities that inhabit and pass through border zones can be described, explained, negotiated, and evaluated.

In the process, the conference will explicitly address the question of how aesthetic activity participates in the processes by which people relate to the real and conceptual geographies in which they live and through which they move. This focus is both socially engaged and inquisitive about the dynamic ways in which cultural phenomena are ascribed value through aesthetic practice. At the same time, it situates the conference at the vanguard of current thinking about aesthetics.

See our Website for a full account of our project and our past activities.

Ulrike Hanna Meinhof is Professor of German and Cultural Studies at the University of Southampton and a specialist in discourse analysis. Her main areas of research currently involve ethnographic research on transnational networks of migrants, especially musicians from African countries, in multicultural neighbourhoods across European border communities, in provincial regions and in metropolitan spaces across Europe. She has previously led the EU Border Identities and Changing City Spacesprojects; ongoing projects are SoFoNe: Searching for Neighbours: dynamics of mental and physical borders in Europe, and TNMundi: Diaspora as social and cultural practice: A study of transnational networks across Europe and Africa.

Frederik Tygstrup is the director of the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. His primary specialization is in the history and theory of the European novel and his present research interests focus on the intersections of artistic practices and other social practices, including urban aesthetics, the history of representations and experiences of space, literature and medicine, literature and geography, literature and politics.

Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell Univeristy. She also directs the Latin American Studies Program. In her often transdisciplinary research, she specializes in contemporary narrative of the Americas, gender studies, and post-colonial literary theory. Her most recent book is the co-edited volume (with Kavita Panjabi) Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas.

The platform Chto delat / What is to be done? was founded with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod. They are at present working on a project concerning the Norwegian-Russian border.