15. It's way too dangerous being a superhero’ - Aesthetic Interventions in Rio de Janeiro's Culture of Violence, Frank Möller

Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.1

Abstract:

This paper introduces the work of the French photographer JR in the  favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the documentary Waste Land about the  Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz's work with "catadores" (garbage  pickers) in Rio's garbage dumps, and José Junior's cultural vision as  epitomized in AfroReggae. These projects are seen here as  cultural/aesthetic interventions in one of the most violent cities in  the world in terms of the numbers of actual killings and also with  respect to structural forms of violence underlying the social,  political and economic functioning of the city. As such, the paper  takes up the question, articulated in the call for papers, of what  art, as a form of social activism, can do to implement non-violence  even in adverse circumstances. The above works of art are discussed in  terms of visibility, recognition and reduction.

16. Subject, Self-image, Non-violence, Igor Pelgreffi

Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.1

Abstract:

This paper questions, starting from Derrida’s works, the theoretical possibility of a place for non-violence into subjectivity.

The experience of Derrida in docu-films (and his subsequent reflections on it) – where he is actor of himself – will be analysed. The concrete ex-position of his discourse to heterogeneous registers (music, images, cutting, direction) and the not full control on his own image (suspended between private and public) may consistently modify the paradigm of self-representation and self-recognition.

Subjectivity vacillates between conscious attention and automatism, between mastery and letting ‘the other’ traverse me.  Precisely in the ambiguous space between activity and passivity, non-violence can arise within subjectivity and unceasingly reconfigure it.

I also argue that being active/passive, as well as actors/directors, may be a pervading condition nowadays, thinking to the increasing net-anthropological dislocation – and reconfiguration – of identity, and of one’s own images, scripts and written remains.

The statute of one’s own image (public/private, external/mental) is changing; one must accept a partial ex-author/isation on one’s own products (intellectual or ethical-political), and learn to manage the transformation. This management works as a (paradoxical) new form of non violent engagement politique, a very primitive and modest pattern of commitment, but possibly necessary.  

17. From Violent Logos to the (Non-)Violence of the Sensuous: Bataille and Nancy on Art and Materiality, Martta Heikkila

Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.1

Abstract:

My presentation examines two differing notions of violence apparent in the theories of art in the 20th Century. First, I shall clarify the role of the “violent logos”, as Jacques Derrida formulated it, in the discourse of Modernism which insisted on the unified form and concept of art. Secondly, I shall present the subsequent postmodern shift into a kind of “violence of the sensuous”: in visual arts this denotes an emphasis on the materiality of the medium and an outburst of what exceeds logical and conceptual approach to the work of art. What is at stake in this trajectory from one type of violence to the other, and whether the postmodern “material turn” of visual arts can even be characterized as violence, shall be my questions.

In particular, I shall present the work of philosophers Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy as introducing the notion of ‘touch’ to replace the paradigm of pure visibility of Modernist painting. Thus they both have enlarged the scope of art by emphasizing its tangible materiality. This is also evident in the work of many artists, and I shall briefly consider few key works to analyze their function in deconstructing the violent hegemony of the rational visuality in art.

18. State of Violence – Imagine Non-violence, Mia Hannula

Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.1

Abstract:

In my presentation, I consider State of Suspension (2008), a film by Dutch cultural theorist and filmmaker Mieke Bal and Israeli filmmaker Benny Brunner, which is “a drama examining the psyche of contemporary Israel, sixty years after independence and Palestinian catastrophe al nakba”. The film is a composite of experimental documentary, consisting of satirical performance, music and poetry (based on the Israeli national anthem and the Declaration of Independence), complemented by the historical archival footage and interviews of people ranging from holocaust survivors to al nakba survivors, from refugees to settlers, and from peace workers to fierce nationalists.

 In my analysis, I address the artistic and aesthetic means of the film ‘as inquiry’ of intercultural relations in the context of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The artistic interventions to the everyday life of the Israelis—Jews and Arabs—reveal the mentality of people who experience both the fear and the normalisation of violence as a daily reflex. The close reading of the film attests, how violence operates at multiple levels and how traumatic historical events continue to shape the inner, interpersonal, socio-cultural, and generational worlds of their subjects. Art is considered as having its share in giving a shape to the complexity of historical reality and imagination is concerned as a social force towards thinking and acting for non-violence.

19. Horrorism and the Graphic Novel: the Case of Exit-Wounds, Dana Arieli

Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.3

Abstract:

In her fascinating Graphic Novel "Exit Wounds" winner of Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel 2008, Rutu Modan depicts an imagined community: One in which a suicide bomber caught in the scene is not being lynched by the crowds but rather gets treated by a nurse of the opposite nationality. Here Horrorism turns into a non-voilant act. In my paper I would like to study Modan's creations as a path for re-thinking and criticizing the justifiability of violence.

20. Vulnerable Bodies: Examples in Contemporary Art, Cristina Giudice

Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.3

Abstract:

My paper is about the relationship between contemporary art, as addressed from a feminist perspective, and violence. I think that the way in which we feel and perceive our bodies and the bodies of the others can be a big opportunity for discussion about violence and non-violence as well. I think that many artists with their works elaborate a critic of justifiability of violence, its unavoidability and its “naturalness”. For example Adel Abdessemed, Tania Bruguera, Regina José Galindo, Alfredo Jaar, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker. The artists tell us about the time we live in, they narrate a reality made by violence and analyze the conflicts caused by differences in gender, religion, social and geographic origin, using a direct language. I think and I will try to demonstrate, that these works are the first necessary step towards concrete change. Artists put violence and its relationship with politics on the stage through their performances and works revealing, with their bodies, that “the human” is defined by her/his vulnerability. This is an estranged vision and a form of social activism that  implements the viewpoint of non-violence.

21. Poetry and ‘War on Terror’: Finding a New Language, Tommi Kotonen

Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.3

Abstract:

In my paper I study how American poets have tried to find a new vocabulary, new language in the political landscape of the so called War on Terror. Especially the group of language poets has stressed the need to find ones way out of the military rhetoric and masculine language of warmongers. One of the members of the group, Charles Bernstein has parodied speeches of Bush and Schwarzenegger, but has also tried to counter them with his poetry of ambivalence, femininity and polyvocality. His latest poetry aims towards nuanced analysis of war and terrorism and violence. Bernstein explores a range of alternatives to the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the popular media as well as to the anti-liberal tendencies of current American politics. I focus in my paper on Bernstein’s poetry and its imagery of “Girly Men”, his feminine alternative to masculine “warrior politics”.

22. Singing and ‘die Betroffenheit’, Maija Pietikäinen

Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.3

Abstract:

Since the 1950s the German political and social theory has thematized the concept of “die Betroffenheit” to describe the horizon of many human experiences caused by the power and the violence in their objectivating and exploiting nature. Günther Anders (Stern), the first husband of Hannah Arendt, opened the discussion as a pre-theorist in this field through his writings about the blindness of the humanity concerning the apocalypse of the nuclear weapons. He renewed his theses in 1986 as the first philosopher after Tšernobyl. Ulrich Beck argues for his part that for the heterogeneity of the new social movements is common the homogeneity of their motives; the personal “Betroffenheit”. Brigitte Rauschenbach calls it as a structural conflict which prevails between the motives of participation caused through “die Betroffenheit” and the democratic premises in the Western societies and which at the same time signals the disturbance in the interactive relationship with the outside world.  In the concret analyses of the German theorists this phenomenon has many reasons, but different from the concept of suffering it has a double-meaning. It is similarly also a spiritual moving point and moving force for the individual strategies to survive and overcome, for the different learning experiences and for the creative processes of the social and political movements. On the other hand it distinguishes from the pre-conscious and reactive strategies in avoiding and rejecting the social and political reality. Their irrelevance is mainly based on the lack of means of expression and the relevant and the adequate concepts. This concerns for the most part also the violence in its nature as a mute and petrified force which is unable to express itself with words in an adequate way.

In my paper I ask the possibilities of the singing to act as a counter force and a resistance to open, to express and to transform the stunned and mute petrifaction of violence. Compared with the other genres of music and art the singing has a double-language and double-order of words and tones in use to intensify its possibilities of empowerment, resistance and emancipation. At the same time the unique, relational and visionary human voice enables for the “Who” to create the common “Mitwelt” as a form of taking care of the world and telling from us as human beings. In this connection I also take some examples from the biography of the Swedish singer Valborg Werbeck-Svärdström.