Gabriella Calchi Novati

ONLINE SYMPOSIUM
"Contemporary Debates on the Ecological Crisis"
Monday January 18, 2021 11 am–6.15 pm

https://migrosmuseum.ch/en/events/online-symposium-contemporary-debates-on-the-ecological-crisis

Registration for the symposium at: kunstvermittlung@migrosmuseum.ch, after which a link will be sent to you.

The Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst collaborates with the Department of Fine Arts and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) to host the online symposium "Contemporary Debates on the Ecological Crisis", which seeks to chart transdisciplinary approaches to cutting-edge debates around the gathering ecological storm. The symposium is held in conjunction with the exhibition "Potential Worlds 2: Eco-Fictions" at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst.

A cooperation of the Department of Fine Arts and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (ZHdK) with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Curated by Gözde Filinta, researcher & curator, Istanbul & Zurich.

In this lecture I engage with Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film "Children of Men" as an ante litteram depiction of the so- called Anthropocene. Set in a not too distant time, the year 2027, the film shows that the human race has become infertile, governments operate in a permanent state of emergency, (illegal) immigrants are considered less-than-human and violently imprisoned in cages. I claim that, in Cuarón’s film - based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men - sterility is not a biological issue, but the metaphor for what the Anthropocene is: namely extinction. Furthermore, I will offer a philosophical and psychoanalytic critique of "Children of Men", in which what has been named ‘annihilation anxiety’ - the anxiety about global warming, environmental extinction and climate refugees - should be considered not a paralysing experience but a potential one.

In this article I directly engage with the special issue’s main question, namely ‘what does staging the wreckage do?’ By employing, as a critical paradigm, Damien Hirst’s wunderkammer (cabinet of wonder) "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable" (2017), I attempt to unveil some of the effects and affects that staging the wreckage instigates. I claim that ‘staging the wreckage’ can be seen as a contemporary dispositif of power, which, by provoking alienation and illusion, aims at disorientating and exhausting the audience’s perception of things. Hirst’s Treasures uncovers the most eerie side of ‘staging the wreckage’ in its being primarily a product of an imagination that is never that of the audience but always of those who are in charge of the very staging. It enables us to envision that opaque zone, that behind the scene, as it were, which always already hides within any staging; that zone where ideology performs at its highest.

For Michel Foucault at the end of the 18th century biopower emerged as a new political form defining a new type of social body. Achille Mbembe, challenging Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, asks if ‘the notion of biopower [is] sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective’ and ‘what place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body); and ‘how are they inscribed in the order of power.’ In this paper I will address such questions by engaging with art works that respond to the contemporary migratory crisis. Specifically, I will instigate a dialogue between the work of Berlin-based art collective Center for Political Beauty (CFPB) and the work of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Two works, produced in 2015, will be at the core of this study: the controversial action The Dead Are Coming by CFPB and Ai Weiwei’s re-enactment of the image of drowned infant Alan Kurdi, which became an iconic image of the “refugee crisis”. In conclusion I will show how in times of migratory crisis inclusion is possible only through a via negativa, what I call “a necropolitics of inclusion”.

In this chapter I examine the work of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra in light of contemporary theories of biopolitics and ‘machinic capitalism’. I advance a new interpretation of this controversial artist’s oeuvre and I introduce two new notions in the context of performance studies and politics: performance of exposure and ethical interruption.

Žižek claims that the obscene message of the unconditional exercise of Power is ‘laws do not really bind me, I can do to you WHATEVER I WANT, I can treat you as guilty if I decide to do so, I can destroy you if I say so.’ Considering that such an ‘obscene excess [is] a necessary constituent of the notion of sovereignty’ , I will analyze the biopolitical tropes that lie behind the videos and images produced and broadcast by ISIS’ propaganda apparatus. I will show how and to what extent these biopolitical tropes, within ISIS’ propaganda, lie on the unstable threshold between theatre and performance and the iconoclastic use of both.

In agreement with Agamben’s main claim that life in our contemporaneity is caught in a state of indistinction, such an indistinction could easily be envisioned as residing in-between what performance studies scholar Diana Taylor calls the archive (i.e. written and tangible text, or broadcast videos) and the repertoire (i.e. ungraspable spoken language, or the “behind the scenes” of such videos).

The concept of indistinction is evident also in the fact that within ISIS’ propaganda a hybrid realm has replaced the mere digital one. Hybrid in the sense that it produces live consequences (people are actually beheaded), while still happening (at least for the audience of these videos) within digital environments (i.e. the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and so on). Therefore, the difference between the archive and the repertoire has become, not only uncertain, but indeed increasingly unstable and necessarily questionable.

The costumes and the staging in their expertly produced video messages are theatrical. While ISIS’ hostages, dressed in orange jumpsuits (an eerie reminder of Guantanamo) with their hands cuffed behind their back, kneel in front of the camera, ISIS’ combatants, dressed in either desert camouflage, or in all black, with their faces covered, confidently stand behind the hostages, knifes in their hands. We are presented with video episodes of a contemporary tragedy that has its silent chorus - ISIS’ soldiers - and its solo messenger, the only one allowed to directly address the “audience” - Jihadi John.

ISIS’ propaganda ‘as’ performance is inconoclastic for, if it is true that ‘iconoclasm can […] be said to function as a mechanism of historical innovation, as a means of revaluing values through a process of constantly destroying old values and introducing new ones in their place’, it is a matter of fact that ‘such a close connection between iconoclasm and historical progress is not logically necessary’. As Boris Groys rightly reminds us, in fact, ‘iconoclasm addresses not only the old but also the new’ by showing that ‘the new gods are not powerful enough, or at least not as powerful as the old gods’. 

By exposing the significance of an iconoclasm that destroys images (i.e. historical works of art and so on), while at the same time being utterly dependent on them (i.e. digital video recordings of these acts of destruction), I will advance that what we are confronted with is not, as Žižek would say, ‘the constitutive excess of representation over the represented’.  Quite the contrary: within ISIS’ propaganda ‘as’ performance, what we encounter is the con-fusion of representation and represented, in that the display of Power shows only the vacuity of a gesture that becomes iconoclastic in its self-referentiality.

According to Giorgio Agamben, 'homines sacri' are individuals whose juridical specificity lies within ‘the unpunishability of [their] killing and the ban on [their] sacrifice’.[1] In Ireland from the 1930s to the 1990s thousands of children were confined to industrial schools and mental institutions; (il)legally forced to inhabit that zone of indistinction - ‘outside both human and divine law’. Irish artist and political ‘actionist’ Gerard Mannix Flynn deconstructs the syntax of such a biopolitics of exclusion, enacting what I name “public performances of inclusion”. Employing Agamben’s thought, I address the biopolitical issues embedded in the Irish ‘culture of child abuse’ in order to question the relationship between these issues and an apparently unavoidable national (un)consciousness. Engaging with the mutually exclusive nature of consciousness and biopolitics, I show how “public performances of inclusion”, by undermining such an exclusivity, allow for unexpected episodes of embodied consciousness to take place.

[1] Giorgio Agamben (1998), 'Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life', Stanford: Stanford University Press: 73.

The Italian theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio, led by Romeo Castellucci, began its passionate incursion into Italian theatre in the 1980s. Through an analysis of their most challenging critical texts and manifestos, as yet unpublished in English, this paper will examine the theoretical foundations of Soc`ıetas Raffaello Sanzio’s oeuvre and the profound implications of the iconoclasm of their performances, and propose new means of deciphering their work. During the 1980s the company forged new linguistic and visual theatrical techniques, which were further developed through the 2002–2004 project, Tragedia Endogonidia. I argue that the relevance of their early work lies in their theoretical and practical widening of the parameters of representation. Excerpts from manifestos and texts written by Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, along with critical texts related to their work, are unless otherwise indicated translated into English by the present author.

Possible areas of investigation could include, but are NOT limited to:

• Biopolitics & the Digital
• Performance Biopolitics
• Performances of Digital Identities
• Selfies & Terrorism
• Suicide & Facebook
• Revenge Porn
• Digital Geopolitics & Biopower
•      Wikileaks
• The Anonymous
• ‘Virtual Jihad’

The above list is intended to be illustrative, not at all exhaustive, of some of the areas where the relationship between biopolitics, the digital and performance occur.

Please submit your abstract (300-500 words) and a short bio to the convener, Dr. Calchi-Novati (calchinovatig@gmail.com) by Friday 15th May 2015. Participants will be notified by the end of May.

In further pursuing the investigation of digital biopolitics that first began at MANCEPT 2015, this year's workshop will focus on the politics, ethics and aesthetics of the digital subjects that are produced by Biopolitics 2.0.

From Foucault to Agamben, from Esposito to Negri and Hardt biopolitics has been preoccupied within the governance of human bodies and the multiple sciences of vitalism. Through biopolitics, we have encountered 'homo oeconomicus', 'homo legalis', 'homo juridicus', 'homo sacer' and 'homo liber', all of which were subjects unified by the singular concept of the body. What was always at stake was the physical body, as first expressed in the 1679 writ habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, 'you will have to have a body to show'. But what kinds of subjects are produced by digital biopolitics?

Arguably these are subjects whose bodies are no longer of crucial importance, for what is at stake is an existence paradoxically situated between a borderlessness of the virtual and faultiness of the real. Digital profiles, data subjects, avatars, barcodes, passwords, and personalised apps, all evidence the birth of a body that is mainly constituted by information. If this holds as true for individual subjects, it is even more explicit when we approach the social or political body. Within digital biopolitics we all exist as long as we are part of a continuous processes of coding, decoding, and recoding data in the apparent redundancy of a physical body 'to show'. Or, to be more precise, Biopolitics 2.0 perverts the traditional formulations of biopower, transforming the body into a tool for authentication of our supposed " unique " digital data.

This chapter analyses the biopolitical tropes that lie behind the videos produced and broadcast by ISIS. It will show how and to what extent these biopolitical tropes, within ISIS’ propaganda, lie on the unstable threshold between theatre and performance and the iconoclastic use of both. In agreement with Agamben’s claim that life is always caught in a state of indistinction, such an indistinction could easily be envisioned as residing in-between what performance studies scholar Diana Taylor calls the archive (i.e. broadcast videos) and the repertoire (i.e. the “behind the scenes” of such videos). The concept of indistinction is evident also in the hybrid realm in which ISIS’ propaganda performs, one that produces live consequences (people are actually beheaded), while still happening (at least for the audience) within digital environments (i.e. the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and so on).

Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 film  mother!  presents a visually allegoric journey into the ‘story of Mother Nature from her point of view’. The film tells the story of a nameless couple: He  is a poet, tormented by writer’s block;  She  is his young wife, who endlessly and obsessively renovates and tidies up the house. The secluded life of the couple, He - “Father-Creator” and She - “Mother-Nature”, in the house - planet Earth - is firstly disturbed and later utterly savaged by hordes of uninvited and abusive guests. Aronofsky states that ‘the movie is a surrealist and disturbing metaphor for climate change, and humanity’s role in environmental destruction.’ Although such destruction has caused the emergence of a wide debate around the so-called Anthropocene,  mother!  concludes with a note of patriarchal hope: He , the poet-creator survives the destruction of the house, and so does the house itself, which re-emerges from its own ashes, time and again. In this paper, I would like to offe...

For Michel Foucault at the end of the 18th century biopower emerged as a new political form defining a new type of social body. Achille Mbembe, challenging Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, asks if ‘the notion of biopower [is] sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective’ and ‘what place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body); and ‘how are they inscribed in the order of power.’ In this paper I will address such questions by engaging with art works that respond to the contemporary migratory crisis. Specifically, I will instigate a dialogue between the work of Berlin-based art collective Center for Political Beauty (CFPB) and the work of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Two works, produced in 2015, will be at the core of this study: the controversial action The Dead Are C...

This paper is part of a bigger project in which I wish to instigate a dialogue between what I have called digital biopoltics or  biopolitics 2.0 [1] and analytical psychology. We have all witnessed with the advent of the Web 2.0 the fact that the space of the virtual has eroded our daily space of experience, becoming the space where we mostly exist and act. Although the virtual is a public space, it seduces its users into believing that it can be, at the same time, also private and intimate. Suffice it to consider the content of personal blogs, or the material that is uploaded on the millions of Facebook , Twitter and Instagram accounts: through these platforms users usually broadcast their most private thoughts and experiences, which, as a consequence, can be consumed via a simple “touch”. The new “touch-screen technologies”, such as smart-phones and tablets, literalise the problematic relationship between touch and knowledge, allowing us only to access a perverted tactile knowledg...

The Italian theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, led by Romeo Castellucci, began its passionate incursion into Italian theatre in the 1980s. Through an analysis of their most challenging critical texts and manifestos, as yet unpublished in English, this paper will examine the theoretical foundations of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's oeuvre and the profound implications of the iconoclasm of their performances, and propose new means of deciphering their work. During the 1980s the company forged new linguistic and visual theatrical techniques, which were further developed through the 2002–2004 project, Tragedia Endogonidia. I argue that the relevance of their early work lies in their theoretical and practical widening of the parameters of representation. Excerpts from manifestos and texts written by Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, along with critical texts related to their work, are unless otherwise indicated translated into English by the present author.

identity [is no longer] a function of the social ‘persona’ and its recognition by others but rather a function of biological data, which could bear no relation to it. Human beings [have] removed the mask [persona] that for centuries ha[s] been the basis for their recognisability in order to consign their identity to something that belongs to them in an intimate and exclusive way but with which they can in no way identify with. (Agamben 2011: 50)

Is there not something catastrophic in the very nature of thought? Thought is driven by an excessive compulsion and is itself an excess over and beyond perception.[…] Thought is seeing what exceeds the possibility of seeing, what is intolerable to see, what exceeds the ...

Amanda Coogan exhibits a specifically Irish dilemma about the female body turned into a public display of the feminine abject through her contemporary performance art. Although Coogan’s visual and symbolic focus on the female body is influenced by her training with the artist Marina Abramovic, the contextualization of Coogan’s work within a specifically Irish pattern of female construction and representation reveals its deepest significance. Coogan carefully foregrounds her own subjectivity, stating that ‘before being a performance artist, I am a white, blond, blue-eyed, Irish woman.’2 Her disclaimer highlights the semiotic peculiarity of the body, an undeniably central aspect of her work. Coogan’s statement echoes Elizabeth Grosz’s claim that ‘bodies are always irreducibly sexually specific, necessarily interlocked with racial, cultural, and class particularities’ and that ‘being a body is something that we must come to accommodate psychically, something that we must live.’3 The essence of Coogan’s work, with its postmodern indifference to any kind of distinction between high and low culture, is neither an object nor an act, but the relationship between her shamelessly exposed body and the Irish patriarchal logic of gender.