Xplore Symposium 2016

EMBODYING ENLIVENMENT – Queer, SM and Eco-Sexual Perspectives

Symposium curated by Sacha Kagan – in the framework of the Xplore Berlin Festival
July 22-24 2016, alte Börse Marzahn, Berlin, Germany

 

Symposium Flyer – Download 1,3 MB

In an age where the modern myths of Mastery and Control have started to crumble down, the rediscovery of the body, of one & many ecology/ecologies, and of intelligence beyond the narrowly rational intellectual realm, is opening up new perspectives for transformation of individuals and society.

Corporeal practices allow us to learn through embodiment, whether they are sexual, gender-related and/or otherwise exploring new territories of self and others. But how do these practices relate to existing social order? How far do they maintain the status quo, titillate social change, or even maybe foster deeper social transformation?

This symposium will explore some alternative cultures in their relations to mainstream cultures. It will investigate individual practices and temporary communities. The guest speakers will introduce different approaches and perspectives, such as Queer, BDSM, Phenomenological Animism, Queer Ecologies, Eco-Sexuality, Metahumanism, and the philosophy of Enlivenement. We will exchange and explore together how knowing and making worlds with the body, rather than ‘against’ the body, relates to philosophical, political and civilizational questions about the kind of society we want to become.

By sharing insights and reflections at the Xplore symposium alongside the Xplore Festival, we invite you to enter in a fruitful reflective dialogue with creative embodied practice, such as the artistic and practice-based insights from the workshops and performances at Xplore 2016.

Each speaker (but the final one) will be giving her or his lecture/intervention twice, over the duration of the symposium.
The symposium will also include a panel discussion among speakers and with the audience, moderated by the symposium curator, on Saturday at 20:00/8 p.m. in the Boersensaal.
Please note the language (English or German) in which each session is conducted.

The Speakers:

Andreas Weber	Caffyn Jesse	Cate Sandilands	Elizabeth Wagner
Poetics of the Flesh	Queer Embodiment	Queering Communities: Becoming (With) Plants	Strategies for (self)normalization in sadomasochism
Fri 11:00h – German	Fri 16:00h – English	Fri 20:00h – English	Sat 13:00h – German
Sat 18:00h – English	Sat 11:00h – English	Sun 13:00h – English	Sun 16:00h – German

Jaime del Val	Robin Bauer	Thomas Burø
Metabody	Transgression, transformation, exuberant possibilities	Our Sad Contempt for Powerlessness
Sat 16:00h – English	Fri 13:00h – English	Sun 18:00h – English
Sun 11:00h – English	Fri 18:00h – English

Sacha Kagan

Curator of the Symposium

Moderator – Panel Dicussion
Sat 20:00 h – English

 

Tickets: 3-day pass: 60 € / students 40 € 1-day-pass: 50 € / students 30 €

Full Information and ticketing: http://www.xplore-berlin.de/index.php/en/symposium-en-16

Overview of (and online resources from) my activities in the first half of 2016

A chronological overview of my public activities (besides my daily university work, i.e. the ongoing research in Hannover for the “SaM” project (“The City as Space of Possibility”) and the teaching in Lüneburg) in the first 6 months of 2016:

• From January 12th to 17th, I took part (as guest speaker) in the “Sinopale Forum: Culture and Creativity for Local Development”, organized by the Sinopale Biennial in the cities of Istanbul (first half of the Forum) and Sinop (second half of the Forum), in Turkey. I was especially talking as guest speaker at a plenary session entitled “Can the concept of Creative City be applied to bottom up sustainable local development strategies? Which alternative economies can be born out of these?”. See the Sinopale Forum website: http://www.sinopaleforum.org/en/
• On January 27th at the “Kulturbackerei” in Lüneburg (Germany), I was invited to take part in a local panel discussion in German language, with local cultural actors and policy-makers, moderated by Leuphana students and prepared by Dr. Verena Holz, about the future of the town’s local cultural sector (the title in German was “Welche Zukunft hat die Lüneburger Kulturlandschaft ?”). The debate had a special focus on Lüneburg’s policies and actions in the relationship betweeen culture and sustainability/sustainable development.
• On January 29th and 30th I took part in the international Workshop “Artistic Strategies for Building Urban Space” in Berlin and Caputh (Germany) organized by Flussbad Berlin. I contributed a case presentation about: “An Embedded Double Agent: Frances Whitehead at the 606” (about the roles of one artist at a project in Chicago, IL, USA).
• On February 19th and 20th, I took part in the interdisciplinary workshop “SEEMING TO BE TO BECOME REALITY: SUSTAINABILITY – A NORMATIVE FICTION IN ART, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY” organized by Prof. Dr. Regine Herbrik at the Methods Center of Leuphana University Lüneburg. My contributed paper was entitled: “”Proving the World more Imaginary”. Cultures of Sustainability, Cultural Sustainability”. More information here.
• On February 23rd, I moderated a conversational workshop (‘Werk­statt­gespräch’) in German language entitled “Zukunftsstadt – Was kann die Kunst?” (City of the Future – What can art do?), as part of the Leuphana BA 1st Semester’s yearly “Konferenzwoche” (conference week) on sustainability. Our two guests were Amelie Deuflhard (Kampnagel, Hamburg) and Markus Bruggaier (Orchester des Wandels, Berlin).
• From April 2nd to 5th, I organized and led a workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, by invitation of the Teatro Maria Matos, within the festival “as 3 ecologias” led by the choreographer Vera Mantero. My workshop was entitled “Urban Spaces of Possibility” (being conceptually related to our ongoing “SaM” research project) and invited participants to apply and experiment with the “walking with video” method from sensory ethnographer Sarah Pink, visiting several sustainability-seeking cultural initiatives in the city of Lisbon. Mode details here (in Portuguese).
• On June 2nd, I gave a guest lecture at the University of Greifswald (Germany) entitled “Artful Sustainability: The imagination of world-making versus the fiction of planning”. The lecture was scheduled as part of the inter-faculty lecture series “Nachhaltigkeit interdisziplinär. Anstöße für den Übergang” (Sustainability in an interdisciplinary way. Impetuses for the transition). Webpage

Overview of (and online resources from) my activities in the second half of 2015

Over the past months, I failed to report on my activities on this blog. I will thus use this single post to catch up (with a chronological overview)…

In the first half of 2015, besides the activities already mentioned in previous posts on this website, I was also involved in the following:

• Since February 2015, I am one of the four Principal Investigators of the Research Project “The City as Space of Possibility”, funded for three years by the new “Science for Sustainability” program of the Lower-Saxonian Ministry of Science. The project, which investigates the city of Hanover (Germany), uniquely integrates three faculties (culture, sustainability and economy) of the Leuphana University Lüneburg, with a central focus on cultures of sustainability. Within the project, I am responsible for the research area “artistic and creative praxis for a sustainable urban development”. The project website is in German language at www.leuphana.de/sam
• On March 1st, I coordinated the invitation by Hannover’s cultural office and the ‘Cultural Organization and Cultural Mediation’ department at Leuphana University Lueneburg, of the US American artist Lillian Ball, for a meeting/workshop around her work, at the Künstlerhaus in Hannover (we watched a documentary film about Waterwash ABC in the South Bronx, Lillian talked about her work, and we had short exchanges with participants about the ecological and social significance of the rivers and canals in Hannover).
• On April 14-16, I was with the “Footwork” research group of the Walking Artists Network, in Cornwall (UK), continuing our walking-workshops (walkshops?) around current directions in walking art, ending with a commonly written Footwork Manifesto which we contributed to the Symposium “Where To? The Future of Walking Arts” about future directions in walking art, at Falmouth University (website).
• On April 27th, I was sharing and exchanging with colleagues and students within my own university (in Lüneburg), about “artistic research and transdisciplinarity”, thanks to an invitation from the inter-faculty Center for Methods, which organizes regular workshops on inter- and transdisciplinary research.
• Still in Lüneburg at the Leuphana university, we had on June 22nd a workshop organized by the Digital School on the theme of “Future U:
  Futures of the University and Universities of the Future?” (which also related to the Arts Management MOOC that we had been collaborating on in previous months).
• Southern in Germany, I was invited on June 29th by the Freiburg Scientific Theatre and the University of Freiburg, gave a talk about “Artful Sustainability Studies: Of aesthetics of complexity and radical open citizenship” (website) and had good exchanges with the members of the scientific theatre group.

In the second half of 2015, we organized at the German Cultura21 network,  the second “Cultura21 Forum” in two steps: First in Cologne, on May 30-31, we organized a sensory-ethnographic visit to the “Tag des guten Lebens” (‘day of good life’, a car-free Sunday festival in the neighborhood of Sülz), for people from outside of Cologne (webpage). Then on September 12th in Hannover as part of the ‘festival of the culture of change’ (Kultur des Wandels Fest), we organized an exchange between Cologne’s Tag des guten Lebens, Hamburg’s Gängeviertel, initiatives by Cultura21 Nordic in Danish cities, and Hannover’s car-free Sunday (webpage).

In the summer 2015, I organized in July a workshop on “Expanding aesthetics of complexity through the alchemy of BDSM: a conversational drift” at Xplore, a sexpositive festival of art, BDSM, Tantra and other embodied practices in Berlin, and in August I presented a paper at the Prague Conference of the ESA (European Sociological Association) on “Performing Contracts: BDSM, Performance Art and Aesthetics of Complexity”. At the Prague Conference I was also elected for two years, as the new Chair of the ESA Research Network 2: Sociology of the Arts.

In mid-October 2015, I was invited by the State University of Saint Petersburg (Russia) to join the second phase of their project “Arts for the City”, whereby we collaborated with the German game-art collective “Invisible Playground”, designing and playing a game in the “Red Triangle” district and discussing urban development (website).

In the final two months of 2015 I have been intervening several times in the context of COP21 (the UN Climate Change Negotiations in Paris):

• On November 21st at the Theatre of Bremen, I gave a talk on “Performance under Climatic Conditions” (webpage).
• On November 28th, I opened the “Second Assembly” in a series of exchanges organized in Paris by BétonSalon, a center for Art and Research at Université Paris 7, with a talk on “L’art queer du convivialisme et la complexité comme expérience: La culture comme transformation dans les espaces de possibilité urbains” (webpage).
• On December 3rd and 4th, I was the General Rapporteur of the ”
  ArtCOP21 Professional Workshop” organized at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, i.e. the gathering of the international cultural sector alongside COP21. In the video below, you can see the final session of that meeting (I am speaking between 1h34 and 1h49 in the recorded video, giving concluding and critical remarks as general rapporteur).

https://gaite-lyrique.eyedo.com/Live/Embedded?id=17220&chapitreId=0&autoplay=0&disposition=2&langue=fr&mute=0

Videos from Helsinki Conference on Youtube

The videos from the plenary sessions at the Helsinki Conference “Culture(s) in Sustainable Futures” (May 6th-8th 2015) are available on Youtube. The list with hyperlinks is here: http://videonet.fi/culturalsustainability/live/

Here below is plenary 3, with Frances Whitehead as Keynote, Lummina Horlings and Hans Dieleman as respondents, and myself (Sacha Kagan) as moderator and introducing the session:

Live streams from Helsinki this week…

This week: live streams from big conference on Cultural Sustainability in Helsinki: http://videonet.fi/culturalsustainability/live/

See also (e.g. for the program of streamed plenary sessions): http://www.culturalsustainability.eu/helsinki2015/