Culture Club 4

I have been asked to speak about occursus/plastiCities at Sheffield’s Culture Club (held at Kelham Island Museum) on May 23rd 2012.

Building on our first three Culture Club Showcase events inspired by the Sheffield Culture Strategy, we are pleased to be linking up with Kelham Island Museum for the fourth event. The theme this time will be about ‘People and Spaces’.

As always, we have an eclectic mix of people presenting and showcasing the amazing cultural work they are doing within the Sheffield region. Expect to see the likes of Lovebytes, Dust, Soul of Sheffield, Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust, occursus, CADS, Martin Hogg, and Open Up.

This event is free and is open to all who is interested in Sheffield’s Creative and Digital Industries. It’s also a great opportunity to bring people from various creative communities together; to mingle, network and to celebrate Sheffield region’s cultural diversity.

Timings

7pm: Doors (‘Anything Goes Orchestra’ will be playing live)

7.45pm: See the River Don Steam Engine in action

8.00pm: Presentations Start

10.00pm: Close (move to Fat Cat pub)

Source: http://sheffculture4.eventbrite.co.uk/

Photography in Contemporary France – conference at the University of Nottingham, June 15th 2012

I have been invited to speak at a conference entitled Photography in Contemporary France at the University of Nottingham, June 15th 2012.

My paper is entitled ‘Retour/détour: Bruno Boudjelal and the Failure of Return’

This one-day conference will consider the multiple manifestations of photography in contemporary French society and culture, spanning the 1990s to the present day. Photography in general has been the subject of ever-increasing scholarly attention over the last decade, but often in relation to other fields and topics, e.g. art, digitisation and other media, literature, (auto-)biography, journalism, popular culture, travel and urban environment.

The purpose of this inter-disciplinary event is to bring together academics working on photography in relation to these and other subjects, in a specifically French context, in order to begin to better map and assess the multi-faceted reality of the medium and its uses, as well as different critical and theoretical approaches to it.

This conference is sponsored by the Society for French Studies, Nottingham French Studies and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies of the University of Nottingham.

Programme:

9.00-9.30 – Registration

9.30-9.40 -Welcome and opening remarks – Kathrin Yacavone (University of Nottingham)

9.45-10.30 -Olga Smith (University of St Andrews): ‘L’image performée’ in French Contemporary Photography

10.30-11.15 – Amanda Crawley Jackson (University of Sheffield): Retour/détour: Bruno Boudjelal and the Failure of Return

11.30-12.15 – Shirley Jordan (Queen Mary, University of London): Photography and the City: Thoughts on Interruption

12.15-13.30 – Lunch break

13.30-14.15 – Fabien Arribert-Narce (University College London): De la ‘notation’ à la ‘fictionalisation’ de la vie : les nouvelles tendances photobiographiques dans la littérature française contemporaine

14.15-15.00 – Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck London): Diary, photojournal or journal d’écriture? Traces of Annie Ernaux in L’atelier noir and Ecrire la vie

15.00-15.30 – Tea break

15.30-16.15 – Andy Stafford (University of Leeds): André Bazin’s ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in Contemporary French Photography

16.15-17.00 – Round table discussion and closing remarks (followed by Vin d’honneur)

Panel: Amanda Crawley Jackson (University of Sheffield), Shirley Jordan (Queen Mary, University of London), Joseph McGonagle (University of Manchester)

 

The Function of the Oblique (Son Gallery, London, June 19 2012)

THE OBLIQUE: A METRIC FUNCTION BETWEEN OPERATION OF HORIZONTALITY AND THE VERTICAL

No Fixed Abode is pleased to announce two events that will coincide with the current show at Son Gallery in Peckham, The Function of the Oblique; Action curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini.

AXIOMATIC PERCEPTIONS will position screenings of Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone’s works Neue Museen (2010) and Things to Come (2011), and Daniel Eisenberg’s film Displaced Person (1981) with guest speakers Daniel Eisenberg, Amanda Crawley Jackson, Gil Leung and Dan Smith.

The event aims to be an opportunity to reflect on how thinking through obliqueness requires us to look at the multiple dimensions of its conception - exactly what the oblique may represent as a tool to appropriate space and create instability, one that forces the body to adapt to disequilibrium and vertigo, raises the possibility of an oblique subject. Interestingly a notion of resistance seems to be of key importance to how a philosophical justification for the oblique may operate. Starting wide of the context of the oblique, the event will aim to position a discourse of horizontality, groundlessness and contingency - both physical and perceptive – to look towards an active, embodied philosophical space.

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone are practising artists who have collaborated since 1993 and exhibit internationally. Graham Ellard is a Reader at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design; Stephen Johnstone is a Reader at Goldsmiths College, University of London. They both live in London.

Daniel Eisenberg has been making films and videos since 1976. His films have been screened throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. He lives and works in Chicago and is a Professor in the departments of Film/Video/New Media/Animation, and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson lectures in the French Department at the University of Sheffield, where she specialises in the treatment of space in contemporary literature and visual arts from France and the French-speaking world.

Gil Leung is a writer, artist and curator based in London. She is Distribution Manager at LUX and editor of Versuch journal. She writes for Afterall and other independent publications.

Dr Dan Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design. His interests are in history, the future and the disruption of the illusion of an ongoing present. His book Traces of Modernity, is published in June.

We would like to thank Attilia Fattori Franchini, Guy Robertson and Tom Saunderson at Son Gallery, and LUX for their support with this event.

No Fixed Abode

For more information, please visit http://www.songallery.co.uk/

Invitation to speak at Nottingham Trent University, June 21 2012

I have been invited to speak at the Nottingham Trent University research conference Culture and Place: Past, Present and Future on June 21st 2012.

The abstract for my paper is a follows:

plastiCities (from the French plasticien / arts plastiques – but also plasticity: the capacity to be shaped or moulded; the adaptability of an organism to changes in its environment or differences between its various habitats) is an interdisciplinary, practice-led project involving students and academics from the University of Sheffield, creative practitioners and local communities. Emerging from occursus, a loose collective of artists, writers, architects, academics and students which coheres primarily around a weekly reading group and online through a blog (occursus.wordpress.com), plastiCities seeks to engage voices from the arts in the discourses that shape our city. Through a series of curated projects (including exhibitions and workshops) and the development of innovative hyperlocal media, plastiCities connects a variety of disciplines through an ongoing engagement with the ways in which we inhabit, imagine, represent and practise our city. As the director of plastiCities, in this paper I will present the development of the project since 2010, its conceptual rootedness in recent urban theory and its ethos as a community-based creative practice.

Issues relating to culture and place have always defined who we are. But today, more than ever, they assume policy relevance. Policy makers across a range of areas must be fully informed about the cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity of the communities they serve. Papers are welcome in any area which contributes to this broad theme with an emphasis on, for example, what do diverse communities, families and individuals value? How have these values been shaped by experience, changed and been communicated over time? How are perceptions of rights and responsibilities changing? And what are the implications for the future development of communities? How does historical knowledge, through, for example, media narratives, literature, linguistic analysis and experience, inform us about how communities survived, thrived and changed? What can we learn from past communities that could inform future communities? How can we better exploit the potential of the past as a lens for looking to the future? How can narratives, images and representations of the past, present and future better inform current ideological, ethical and moral debates? How do educational approaches, cultural and religious perspectives and beliefs, utopian and dystopian visions, frame debates about the future? How can the creative potential of the arts and humanities be harnessed to imagine and envision alternative futures?  CFP, Nottingham Trent University

Arts/Science events at PSL Leeds

I have been invited to chair a symposium at PSL (Project Space Leeds), which will explore the ways in which the space between science and art manifests itself.

For more information, see Dialogues Closing Event

Talk at the University of Durham

Talk at the University of Nottingham

Jérôme Grivel speaks about his occursus residency at Site Gallery

occursus has its 3rd artist in residence at Site Gallery

As part of the occursus research project, Jérôme Grivel has just begun his residency at Site Gallery (Sheffield). This is the third residency we have been able to commission and host at Site, thanks to the generous funding of DLA Piper.

While Jérôme is here, Jérôme and I will be developing exhibition and publication plans. He will also be giving invited talks to final-year undergraduate students at the University of Sheffield and leading on of the occursus Reading Loops.

For more information, see www.sitegallery.org

 

Reading Loop (2)

The next series of Reading Loop begins in October 2011.

The series – which will include texts by authors such as Jacques Rancière and Nicolas Bourriaud – takes place at the University of Sheffield.

In 2012, I will be editing a 2nd occursus book based on responses to the texts selected for the second series.