From: Marie Sophie Beckmann
Date: Dec 9, 2022
Subject: CFP: Sub(e)merging: Poetics, Temporalities, Epistemologies
(Oldenburg, 25-27 May 23)
Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, May 25–27, 2023
Deadline: Feb 10, 2023
Call for Proposals – International workshop:
Sub(e)merging: Poetics, Temporalities, Epistemologies.
Organized by the research department Theory and History of Contemporary
Media, Institute for Art and Visual Culture, Carl von Ossietzky
University Oldenburg.
Jennifer Mehigan and Bassam Al-Sabah’s animated film A Paradise Out of a
Common Field (2020) follows a zombie as she emerges from the soil of a
lush garden and submerges into the glittering depths of the ocean. A
voice can be heard from off-screen, pondering Irish graveyards as sites
of class and gender trauma, and forgotten or rather subdued history, but
also as "pleasure grounds" of metamorphosis and transition, of kinship,
allies, and, indeed, life: "the gossip in the mass famine grave was
probably more exciting than the bullshit of the middle-class cemetery."
Tapping into the defiant yet activating quality of the underground and
its porous line of demarcation, A Paradise Out of a Common Field engages
with what we might call "submerged modes." Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017)
introduced the term to describe complex and, above all, resistant forms
of life and knowledge. These social ecologies exist in specific material
and media environments; sites of industrial as well as
digital-capitalist, neocolonialist exploitation, takeover, oppression,
and surveillance, while also resisting these powers. Through their
intangible density as well as their illegible heterogeneity, these
perspectives elude an "extractive view" from above, that is, approaches
that aim at totalizing representation, (scientific) disciplining, and
capitalist valorization. Instead, they invite engagement with methods
and perspectives that are equally submerged: a perception from below.
These perspectives may be messy or unstable, but by enabling (or rather
requiring) a mode of "perceiving life differently," (Gómez-Barris), a
"seeing with one another without claiming to be another," (Haraway 1988)
much can be learned from them.
Seeking to open and expand the rich repertoire of meanings of
Gómez-Barris’s concept–and focusing on its generative potential by
slightly altering its terminology–the international transdisciplinary
workshop Sub(e)merging invites artistic and scholarly contributions from
various fields to probe the transformative potentials of operating and
perceiving from below, especially in times of political and ecological
crisis. How can we take seriously the processes of gathering and
evolving inherent in the term submerging? In other words: What emerges
in submersion?
We are particularly (but not only) interested in the following aspects
and questions:
Aesthetic, material and visual aspects of submerging - What does an
aesthetic of submerging look like? What is its affective dimension?
- What challenge does submerging pose to modes of representation?
- How can submerging be discussed in relation to the role that imaging
media and technologies play in making "submerged modes" visible?
- What are potential contexts and material environments of submerging;
the "damaged landscape, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin"
(Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015)? The swamp, the soil, the deep sea? The archive,
the cemetery, the tunnel, the landfill?
Epistemological and methodological dimensions of submerging
- How can going beneath the surface become a position from which to
perceive, speak, act, and operate (differently) – a site of learning
with/from buried or disqualified, that is, "subjugated knowledges"
(Foucault 2003); a way of "recuperating the lost bodies of history"
(DeLoughrey and Flores 2020)?
- How does submergence destabilize the ground as a site of stability or
evidence to become a conceptual tool for "milieu-specific analysis" (Jue
2020) or the study of "liquid ecologies" (Blackmore and Gómez 2020)?
Spatial and temporal layers of submerging - How do the spatial and
temporal specificities of submerging matter? - To which degree can
submerging upset normative chronologies and spatial hierarchies?
(Eco-)politics of sub(e)merging
- How can we make productive the tension (and interrelation) between the
different forms of going below; between chosen/strategic submerging,
violence or suppression, and submersion as the result of anthropogenic
climate change that has led to a shift in environmental boundaries (as
in sea level rise, a flood, or landslide)?
- How does submersion relate to the underground in its many material and
metaphorical meanings–as porous and paradoxical contact zone of longing
and mysticism, of rich ecosystems, complex infrastructures (of care), of
colonization, exploitation and exclusion, of imagination and otherness?
- In what ways can submerging become an act of resistance, imagination,
protest, refusal, or revenge, an "emergent strategy from the deep"
(brown 2017, Gumbs 2020)?
Formally, the workshop is open, meaning that contributions can choose
the usual presentation form (individual papers of 20-30 min.), but other
formats like conversations or material discussions are equally welcome.
Presentations should preferably be held in English, but German is
possible as well. Please send an abstract (max. 300 words), along with a
brief biographical note (max. 150 words) and/or queries, by email to the
following address by February 10, 2023: medienwissensch...@uol.de.
Applicants will be notified of acceptance by the end of February, 2023.
Funding is being applied to run the workshop.
Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Sub(e)merging: Poetics, Temporalities, Epistemologies (Oldenburg,
25-27 May 23). In: ArtHist.net, Dec 9, 2022.
<https://arthist.net/archive/38131>.
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