Within the framework of CARTA '22, Antwerp University’s Research Centre for Visual Poetics organizes a series of public lectures and artists talks, and closed seminars.
On Breath, Negativity and Blissful Fantasies
‘I can’t breathe’ - this sentence has over the past years become charged with various interconnected meanings, ranging from the overwhelming pressure of neoliberal society, to deadly violence and racism, to the panic and pain caused by a new life-halting illness. Respiration is a subject that will help us dissect the condition of contemporary chaos in two ways. First, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, the foremost theorist who writes on anti-capitalist politics and aesthetics argues, in Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, that the state of global information overload disrupts the local temporality and dismantles our social fabric. In poetic parlance, he asserts that due to the condition of neuro-totalitarianism, our rhythm of the ‘mental time’ becomes increasingly spasmodic ending in what we call ‘panic’. Second, respiration is a crucial concept in the post-Covid world, a world that Berardi calls the ‘implementation of capitalist nightmare’ because even obtaining efficient oxygen is now fixed into the discourse of class struggle, social segregation, and hate speech against minorities. Knowingly or unknowingly, the network bubble consolidated through the multiple peer conversations during Covid accelerated to eradicate the inaudible voices, increased the amount of informational noise, and forced many of us into a mental whiteout: simultaneously benumbed and panicked in the durational pandemic.
Within this negativity, however, the artists who were deprived of their normality started to performatively fantasize about multivalent forms of gatherings, intimacies, and collective antidotes. All of a sudden, the pandemic has halted our automated normality and, in turn, reactivated the future as a space of possibilities. Giorgio Agamben affirms in Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, when we are forced to encounter death, or when we face ‘the purely negative register of this being-for-death,’ via negativa, our existence reaches its ‘own most proper dwelling place and comprehend itself as a totality.’ To use a phrase that describes visual and performance artist Wu Tsang, artists started to create and perform ‘fantasies of intimacy in the face of adversity.’ Taking all this as a theoretical basis, this series of seminars and lectures on Performance Studies will contemplate issues and topics that emerge from the intersection of breath, negativity, and blissful fantasies and how they are conceived of in both theory and artistic practices. We aim to foster an intense exchange on urgent theoretical and artistic topics, from the fields of philosophy, musicology, dramaturgy, and performance studies.