90710 - LAB - Curatorial Practices (M-Z)

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

Students learn the basic theoretical and practical approaches of curating exhibitions and they explore various curatorial methodologies and strategies for different forms of exhibitions (monographic, thematic, collection presentations, performances, media-based and interactive projects, etc.). They become also familiar with social practice and urban projects in public contexts, and with alternative or artist-run spaces. Through readings and discussions, viewing assignments and journals, field trips, and guest lectures, they are able to analyse the role of curators and cultural producers today.

Contenuti

This lab aims at engaging students with theories around ‘race’ and racism, identity and displacement, sedentarism and mobility, borders and boundaries and in producing artworks around those themes. The ‘translation’ of theories into artworks and installations through an array of different aesthetic registers and languages will be the central component of the Lab, Our ambition is to reflect on how to produce art that can bring about perceptual (and emotional) re-orientations around issues of ‘race’, self and otherness.

To that aim, the laboratory will encourage students to address the ways in which art, politics and academic literature can intertwine and on the transformative potentials of different genres.

The overarching conceptual framework of the Lab stems from Jacques Ranciere’s insights on the relation between aesthetics and politics in the production of consensus and dissensus. Notably, dissensus must cut across and destabilise consensus -that is assigned hierarchies and normative forms of belonging, genres and discourses - by introducing new subjects and objects into the field of perception.

Our laboratory will be articulated through a combination of engagement with theories, lectures and guest lectures, class discussions and presentations, and the production of art projects/installations which will be displayed in and across the university and the city of Bologna (when possible). Through aesthetic subversion and perceptual challenges, we hope to contribute to creating spaces of debate around public discourse on issues such as identity, racial constructions and belonging. We will reflect on what resistance (or dissensus) can look like in political art such as subvertising (the removing, altering, and replacing outdoor advertisements), urban interruptions, aesthetic disruptions as ways of destabilising dominant discourses and aesthetic representations which normalise racial hierarchies and racism. By focusing on the aesthetic dimension of politics and the political dimension of art, students will be encouraged to think of ways of challenging dominant representations (consensus) and bring about dissensus. Our explorations of these issues will draw from different contexts and historical experiences across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Testi/Bibliografia

Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The cultural politics of emotions (Second edition.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Introduction. Feel your way.

El-Tayeb, F. (2008). ‘The Birth of a European Public": Migration, Postnationality, and Race in the Uniting of Europe’. American Quarterly, 60(3), 649-670.

Fieni, D. 2012. What a Wall Wants, or How Graffiti Thinks: Nomad Grammatology in the French Banlieue. Diacritics 40 (2), 72-93

Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness, London, Verso.

Gilroy, P., 2001. Against race: Imagining political culture beyond the color line (1st Harvard

Gilroy, P., 2004. Between camps: Nations, cultures and the allure of race. London: Routledge.

Hage, G. 2012. Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Political Imaginary Today. Critique of Anthropology 32 (3): 285-308.

Haiven, M. & A. Khasnabish. 2010. What is Radical Imagination? A Special Issue. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action. 4 (2), i-xxxvii.

Hall, S. (1997). ‘Race: the floating signifier’ http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf

Harrison, F. V.1995. The Persistent Power of "Race" in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism [https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000403] . Annual Review of Anthropology 24(1): 47-74.

Hill Collins, P. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, Routledge, 2004.

Ioanide, P. (2015). The emotional politics of racism: How feelings trump facts in an era of colorblindness. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Laforteza, E. M. C. 2015. The somatechnics of whiteness and race: Colonialism and mestiza privilege. Farnham, Surrey ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Lyon-Callo, V. and S. Brin Hyatt. 2003. The Neoliberal State and the Depoliticization of Poverty: Activist Anthropology and Ethnography from Below. Urban Anthropology 32 (2): 175-204.

Martinez, E.B. 2000. Where Was the Colour in Seattle? Looking for reasons why the Great Battle was so white. In Colorlines, March 10 2000 Accessed 4.5.2018

Moors, A. and Salih, R (2009) guest-editors special issue: ‘Muslim women’ in Europe: Secular normativities, bodily performances and multiple publics’ Social Anthropology, 17(4).

Obasogie, O. K. 2014. Blinded by sight: Seeing race through the eyes of the blind. Stanford, California: Stanford Louisiana Books, an imprint of Stanford University Press.

PARIKH, S. and KWON, J.B. (2020). ‘Crime seen’, American Ethnologist, 47: 128-138. doi:10.1111/amet.12887 [https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12887]

Rancière, J. & S. Corcoran 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics.New York & London: Continuum

Rancière, J. & S. Corcoran 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics.New York & London: Continuum

Rancière, J. 2010. Ten Theses on Politics. In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. J. Rancière & S. Corcoran, 27-44. London & New York: Continuum

Salih R., Zambelli E., Welchman, L. (2020) ‘”From Standing Rock to Palestine We are United”: diaspora politics, decolonisation and the intersectionality of struggles’. Ethnic and Racial Studies DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2020.1779948 [https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.1779948]

Salih, R and Richter-Devroe, S. (2014) ‘Cultures of Resistance. The case of Palestine and beyond’ Arab Studies Journal, Spring 2014 (Vol. XXII No. 1).

Schacter, R. 2008. An ethnography of iconoclash. Journal of Material Culture. 13(1), 35-61.

Metodi didattici

Students will be forming groups and will work together, supported by the tutor, in producing their artwork/projects. These can take many different shapes. They can be a mini-ethnographic project, an assemblage of images, an installation of a flipchart in a student accommodation or in a public square with an image or a question that can be asked to passers-by. Similarly, artwork can take the shape of a photographic project, a musical composition or a documentary, it can be a demonstration, a subvertising project or an alteration of dominant images around self and otherness. An oral history project with a visual art component could also be presented. These are just ideas which by no means exhaust the array of possibilities. You are encouraged to use your creativity to interrogate the world around you (or far away), through a race/gender lens in a creative and personal way.

Alongside this, each group will submit and present a brief commentary reflecting on how academic literature inspired the themes raised in the projects. This commentary can be 1-3 pages long and will:

1) Identify and spell out a question (can be, but not strictly limited to, the topics addressed in the Lab).

2) Refer to and quote academic literature to elaborate on the essay question.

3) Elaborate on how the art-project visualises the question the commentary is addressing. Engage with academic debates and with academic literature on the topic.

5) If you are elaborating on your positionality, because this is relevant for the project and question you are dealing with, you are encouraged to write in the first person in the commentary

A list of references is provided but this is to be considered an open ended syllabus which will be enriched by students’ contributions and items throughout the duration of the Lab

Modalità di verifica e valutazione dell'apprendimento

Class presentations, discussions, final projects.

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Ruba Salih