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- NOTES ON EUROPE. THE DOGMATIC SLEEP. ProcPublication . Neves, Eduarda; Lima, Luís; Rodrigues, Nuno Ricardo FaleiroThe notion of "Europe" has been questioned since the last decades of the twentieth century, especially in the territory of the so-called European Studies. Since World War II, Europe has lost its visionary project of a privileged race of the human kind, thanks to the consequences of its policy of self-destruction, already present in the first half of the last century, to the effects of decolonization and the loss of ethnocentrism. The convulsions at the level of world politics and geopolitics definitely change the course of history. What Europe is left after the great historical controversies that have crossed and continue to cross it? What critical framework is possible to outline today so as to understand the various interactions and disseminations that make Europe fundamentally a kind of financial and commercial brand? What place can there still exist in the world for a Europe that does not yield to the imperialist tradition? As Sloterdijk critically questions, is this commonplace that tries to formulate Europe as a "unity of differences" or "a set of contradictions" a empty one? What is the possibility of a heterotopic becoming for Europe? How to wake it from the dogmatic sleep as did Kant in respect to Reason? Since the modern age, in which European cartography has practically reduced the terrestrial globe and the representation of the world to Europe, until today, the old continent loses its enchantment, its mystical character, being increasingly challenged as a paradigm. If it is true that it will continue to be privileged, this fact can not prevent us from thinking about what we are as history, from establishing a dialogue with ourselves, a kind of personal archeology. Similarly, in the territory of art, Europe has been the subject of complex debates, in the domain of which some artists have been called in to participate, questioning both the political reorganization of post-Second World War, recent political decisions, or artistic mapping based in geopolitical strategies in a global context. If European art was regarded as the world’s art, its protectorate seems to have been emptied. Will those who Sloterdijk calls "the second-rate artists" be the ones who continue to overestimate heterogeneity and otherness, making efforts to maintain the myth of the European dream? Proceedings of the international conference “NOTES ON EUROPE. The dogmatic sleep” (Porto: ESAP, October 29-31, 2019)
- Disfiguring Figures. The political potentiality of Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s choreographic workPublication . BALONA, AlexandraDeparting from the German philologist Erich Auerbach’s foundational study on the genealogy of figura—a concept that belonging to the three different fields of theology, rhetoric and visual arts has laid the foundations of the theories and practices of Western European representation—and following the reformulations by Freud, Gilles Deleuze, and Lyotard of this influential notion of figura as indeterminacy between form and process, the visible and the invisible, sensible and intelligible, the corporeal and the spiritual, this paper wishes to address how the choreographed figures of ambivalence, hybridity and metamorphosis in Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ works, namely, in her solo work ‘Guintche’, set the stage for a contemporary criticality of some of the structuring postulates of European modernity.
- “Europe” in Literary Sources: A Political Ideal, and a StrategyPublication . DI MEO, CarmenIn response to the growth of scholarly interest and research in the field, the present contribution tracks the work done by eminent cultural historians, like Federico Chabod (1962), in the course of the Twentieth century on the occurrences of the word “Europe” in past literary sources, starting with the Middle Ages. On the basis of a trans-historical perspective, the contribution shall draw conclusions on the historical reception of “the birth of Europe” – both as a “Corps Politique”, and as a strategic concept. It is possible to extent this conceptual frame to the development of a European culture, in order to see how this idea, borne out of Medieval epics, might had contributed in good order to shape a European identity, and had exercised at the same time its “agency” under a political and military strategy, to be seen as a counterpart to the more universal idea of a “Christendom”. The phenomenon here discussed is especially rooted in the birth of vernacular cultures and languages, and the discussion throughout the paper will contextually match the reading of European history made up to present times with the analysis of Early romances and novels. In doing so, a critical approach is pursued.
- Tremor, Uncertainty, Invention. Europe and the seaPublication . ANGELUCCI, DanielaIn recent years the migrations that cross the sea around Europe call into question the philosophy, which is urged to think about this Outside. How can we avoid an objective discourse, but also the offence of being too familiar with situations so different from our own, as European citizens? By calling into question the category of "intercessor" proposed by Deleuze, perhaps the artistic narrative can help us in this approach. The sea as a mobile territory can then be described in the tremor that animates it (Glissant), in the uncertainty that it implies (Melville), in the invention of a new space and of a new people that it could bring with it (Deleuze and Guattari). These three characteristics emerge in the work of video artist Laura Waddington, Border, as an example of invention and intercession that makes tremor and uncertainty visible.
- Deprovincializing and denationalizing European FeminismsPublication . MONTANARO, MaraTo rethink European feminisms on an international scale requires a powerful theoretical reworking of space. It is a question of thinking the materiality of its borders not as something fixed, given once and for all, but on the contrary, as a dimension where the feminist struggles, the new subjectivations that come out of it, the changing gender relations, constantly reformulate and rebuild its limits, its borders. Hence, the need to consider a geography capable of making space the object of a critical problematization, to show how this space - and its historicity - is affected in its geographical and cultural materiality by the postcolonial and decolonial feminist struggles. In this talk I will focus on showing how "denationalizing European feminisms" following Dipesh Chakrabarty's invitation to provincializing Europe, means to interrogate genealogy, the very story of European feminisms, through this denationalization. If belonging to the women's movement does not require the blind adherence to a dogma or a definite and valid representation of all times, then re-politicizing European feminisms means inventing new ways of being together, by choosing according to which priorities and by what means to tinker with fragmentary theories, or even how "to move" to implement a plural and multilingual dialogue - in short, it is a question of imagining a radically international feminism.
- To Draw Borders and the Aesthetic Mind: reviewing Europe with Almada NegreirosPublication . LAMBERT, Maria de FátimaAt the beginning of the 20th century, Almada Negreiros considered that Portugal had urgently to step into Europe and the only way to achieve it was through cultural performing, affirming the straightness of modern thought. Almada acted in several paths of creation what might diagnose his profile as a “polychrome artist”, following Edward T. Hall in The hidden dimension (1966, 173). Let’s underline the principle of a South European polychrome person that shaped the unique (but multiple) direction of Almada’s achievement in his multidisciplinary artistic and thinking roles. Nowadays, a century after reviewing his writings concerning Europe (from his modernist period), how can we understand his obsession? Let's analyse what involves the title “Portugal in the Map of Europa” published at SW – Sudoeste, the magazine he kept for three numbers during 1935. And, on the other hand, considering his multiple achievements as an artist and performer thinker, how did the idea of Europe – its utopia survived all those decades until the Portuguese 1970’s? And let’s add Almada’s compulsive quest for the universal language before writing – the antegraphy developed as an inner and essential thinking. How do it connect with the urge for modernity? Can it be reasoned in a two highways pursuit: the European assumption of Portuguese nationality versus that Universal visual writing which existed since the early age of humanity? Are those anthropological, philosophical and aesthetic/artistic proposals by Almada deeply linked or/and setting forth gaps, even paradoxes’ aims? And, mainly, when regarding his African ancestors, that apparently he never emphasized too much, should it be considered the link of his demand for antegraphy the universal visual language present in all continents? Maybe that concept of polychrome artist is a key for shaping Almada’s solo utopian identity with a www anthropological geography. Was he a true paradigm of a polychrome artist?
- Europe's Architectural Identity – a visualisation method of ideasPublication . LENGYEL, Dominik; TOULOUSE, CatherineEurope is also architecture. When Jacques Derrida counts philosophy, democracy and the Enlightenment, architecture is an essential gap. There is a number of artistic expressions, but amongst them architecture, as the space that we live in, plays an exposed role. Architecture is a criterion, a tradition that truly belongs to Europe. A debate on the architectural artistic representation of Europe from the past to the future will consolidate a place for Europe in the world. And this place does not, at least not in the principal sense, yield to the imperialist tradition. On the contrary, Europe’s architecture consists mainly of civilian or clerical buildings. Built architecture though is subject to its deterioration, while the intellectual achievement of architectural projecting and design are what will be left of Europe’s history. Architectural ideas are almost timeless as they always negotiate ourselves in our environment. But ideas are rarely acknowledged as deserved. In most cases, architecture that does not meet today’s needs is considered as part of building archaeology. But there is much more in historic architecture, a wealth of inspirations. Architecture has always been more than buildings. This artistic surplus needs to be exposed, to be presented as a timeless intellectual achievement that goes far beyond its original historical intention. For this we have developed a method that visualizes architectonic ideas. The presentation aims to demonstrate and illustrate this method by several projects developed by the authors in cooperation with archaeological research institutions like Cologne Cathedral and its Predecessors (by order of and exhibited in Cologne Cathedral), The Metropolis of Pergamon (within the German Research Fund Excellence Cluster TOPOI, actually exhibited in Leipzig as part of Sharing Heritage, the European Cultural Heritage Year 2018), The Palatine Palaces (by order of the German Archaeological Institute, both latter exhibited in the Pergamon Museum Berlin).
- Two Extremes at the European Peripheries: Baltic and Iberian post-industrial culturesPublication . moreira, ines`Two extremes at the European peripheries: Baltic and Iberian post-industrial cultures´ departs from a precise title and essays grasping distant and, to a certain extent, unrelated contemporary cultural conditions of two extremely diverse regions in the periphery of Europe, one facing the Baltic sea and the former USSR, the other facing the Atlantic and its former empires. Undergoing dissimilar historical and political processes, the Baltic region and the Iberian Peninsula relate to recent XXth and XXIst Century history differently: the resignification of past events, sites and stories can be extreme, whether celebrated or remembered, other times actively supressed and effaced. The spatial strategies towards the (industrial) past and the new unbound contemporary cultural practices are diverse and may not be represented in a single overarching map. This written essay aims to bring forth examples of resignification of the past and memory through new contemporary and spatial cultures by posing a set of questions: which pasts are celebrated and effaced through spatial intervention? Are new cultural projects altering historical narratives? The document sits in observations taken from fieldwork and research activity in three different sites – Tallinn, Chernobyl/Prypiat and Porto - and assumes a fragmentary and grounded position, inscribing the annotations and a posteriori conceptualization on a possible dialogue between the conditions and the contrasting cultural approaches.
- Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques RancièrePublication . Lima, LuísAt the end of his book, La Chair des Mots, politiques de l'écriture (1998), Jacques Rancière evokes a wall, a frontier, in the nomad and plastic thinking of Gilles Deleuze. The approach is twofold: on the one hand, literary, summoning affections and concepts but, above all perceptions, these conceptual characters that Deleuze inaugurates in a between-two of philosophy and literature, «philosophiture», he would say, or «literasophy»; on the other hand, it is political, evoking the horizontality and verticality, equality and difference of a people to come. In both cases, Rancière envisions the possibility of a Deleuzian wall, which would be something of the order of the frontier. We know how Deleuze abhorred frontiers and, at least, among it, he would agenciate cracks and lines of passages, lines of escape, lines of flight. To retake the idea that Jacques Rancière explores in his text entitled Deleuze, Bartleby, and the literary formula, there would be a wall in Deleuze's thought, a limiting barrier of his own thinking. The end or the cut of the flow, according to Rancière, is stated as it: «The strength of any strong thought is also the ability of disposing itself its aporia, the point where it no longer passes». Now, Deleuze avoid the point, «to make the point» repulses him, always prefering the line. So this wall-end-point could not be a strong aporia in the bosom of a strong thought without also being a line of escape, a passage, an opening or a pause before gaining speed again. A wall of slowness to better accelerate. Here is what this article proposes to enunciate: from the characters that Deleuze extracts from the novels of the authors and the literature he appreciates to reach the haecceities, these asubjective singularities that are not identities but are perfectly individuated, to assure them a territory and a voice, the possibility of the univocity of an European people to come.
- Europe without Organs? Opicinus de Canistris and the New Anomos of the EarthPublication . MOLL, Łukasz; POSPISZYL, MichalThe on-going crisis of identity of Europe is related to deep transformations of European borders. Today’s borders no longer lie at the limits of territorial order. We live in turbulent times of shifting and metamorphosing of the European borders. In this critical context new geopolitical imaginaries of Europe are much needed. We argue that in our situation analogous representational crisis of Europe which arose at the end of the Middle Ages is worth examining. The collapse of medieval vision of the world, in which “res publica christiana” played the crucial part, was followed by the revolution in mapping of space with portolans, scientific cartography and secularization of knowledge. One of the most imaginative and confusing cartographer of the passage from political theology of papacy and empire to modern territorial state system was the 14th century priest, Opicinus de Canistris. Our theoretical attempt is a part of renewed interest in Opicinus’ work (K. Whittington, V. Morse). We propose the analysis of his maps in the light of medieval theories of political body. Rapid social changes enabled Opicinus to combine theological and secular arguments in order to represent deterritorialization of Europe (as understood by Deleuze and Guattari). Opicinus experienced new possibilities of mapping space before Eurocentric reterritorialization of the globe took place (as described by Carl Schmitt in The Nomos of the Earth). His discovery of forces of immanency and free flows of desire may be of actual relevance today when spatial order of Europe passes through profound transformations of unknown destination. Deleuzian reading of Opicinus’ bodyworlds could contribute to deepening our imagination into cartography of the anomos, of autonomous and mobile force of migrants who cease to be organized by paradigm of inhospitable European sovereignty.