Figurations of Solidarity. Movements of the Political in Minor Cinema

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Figurations of Solidarity. Movements of the Political in Minor Cinema

Veranstalter
Research Platform 'Mobile Cultures and Societes. Interdisciplinary Studies on Transnational Formations', University of Vienna; tfm – Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna; Aisthesis – Plattform für kritische Medien ind Kulturtheorie
Veranstaltungsort
Jura Soyfer Saal, Hofburg, Batthyanystiege 26, 1010 Vienna
Ort
Vienna
Land
Austria
Vom - Bis
08.12.2016 - 10.12.2016
Website
http://mobilecultures.univie.ac.at/figuration-of-solidarity/
Von
Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft

Suspending identity and avoiding standstill, figuration assembles elements of upheaval and transformation, socially and medially cast. As an “unstable phenomenal presence” (Philippe Dubois), figuration expropriates the contoured figure from itself, confronts gestures of inclusion with motions of release, and lays the foundation for constellations of collectivity. Figural expression and the medium of film are inherently connected. Their practices as well as their pictorial materiality create temporal relations that “our usual perception” (Gilles Deleuze) proves unable to grasp. Rigorously blurring boundaries, figuration and film provoke surprising encounters of things unequal. They shatter the relation between inside and outside, proximity and distance, the individual and society, transforming it into something fragmentary and incomplete. Thus, they allow “strangeness, otherness, radical change” (Louis Marin) to emerge. Figurations interweave aesthetics with political and historical contexts. The cinema becomes their stage as the filmic image probes its penchant for revolution.
The “minor” image lodges in these out-of-focus movements of collective utterance, intervention, theft, and re-appropriation. The cinema of “minor” forms and un/veiled resistances collaborates with figuration in a concise fashion. “On the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back,” (Stefano Harney/Fred Moten) this “minor” cinema saw its heyday in the 1960s when it underwent a revolutionary schooling. During that time, the “concept of fighting” was subject to a similar transformation: “The media framework has become the actual, ubiquitous battleground in manifold ways since the 1960s.” (Rey Chow)
Attempting to fathom their historical conditions, the conference will revisit these heterogeneous movements that interweave the aesthetical with the political, and interrogate their potential for future strategies. It will question the stakes of solidarity on and beyond the screen: a venture that has found common ground of transnational relevance in Algeria since the nation’s formal independence in 1962.

Programm

THURSDAY – December 8, 2016

14.30 – 15.00: Welcome and Introduction

15.00 – 15.45: Algiers’ Blood – Film Program 1

Coffee Break

16.15 – 18.15: Archives of Missing

From the Representation of the Colonial Subject to the Representation of the Freed Subject. Algerian Cinema facing Independence
(Presentation in French)
– Daho Djerbal (Université d’Alger II)

Missing George Jackson's Knife and Haile Gerima's Missing Wig: Intifada Archives of Solidarity, Kinship or Complicity. Beyond the Media Spectacle of Hashtags
– Greg Thomas (Tufts University, Medford)

Discussant: Nanna Heidenreich (ifs Köln)
Moderated by Viktoria Metschl (Universität Wien)

FRIDAY – December 9, 2016

9.30 – 11.00: The Event of the Minoritarian

Micropolitics or The Art of Becoming-Minor
(Presentation in German)
– Marc Rölli (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)

Genealogies of Becoming-Minor: Cinema as ‚minor art‘
(Presentation in German)
– Petra Löffler (Humboldt Universität Berlin)

Discussant: Marc Ries (Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach a.M.)
Moderated by Lena Stölzl (Universität Wien)

Coffee Break

11.30 – 13.30: In the Territorial Crosshairs: Algeria

The Algiers Cinémathèque: a Space of (Post)Revolutionary Solidarity?
– Yasmina Dekkar (Goldsmiths University of London)

Fear, Sex, and the Algerian War
– Todd Shepard (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore)

Libération Afrique. Algiers, Paris, and the Failure of the French Radical Left to Mobilize against Portuguese Colonialism
– Christoph Kalter (Freie Universität Berlin)

Discussant: Brigitta Kuster (Arstist / Writer / Researcher, Berlin)
Moderated by Christian Kravagna (Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien)

Lunch

14.30 – 15.45: Imagining the Networks. Filming Tricontinental – Film Program 2

Curated and presented by Mathieu K. Abonnenc (Artist / Filmmaker, Metz / Rome) & Olivier Hadouchi (Film Historian / Researcher / Curator, Paris)

Coffee Break

16.00 – 18.00: Broken Choreographies: Revolution

Political Prisoners and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Egypt: Visuality, Iconicity and Materiality
– Atef Botros Al Attar (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Doha)

The Square and the People. Sergej Loznitsa, MAIDAN (2014), and Jehane Noujaim, THE SQUARE (2013)
– Stefanie Diekmann (Universität Hildesheim)

‘Je suis venu pour vous tuer.’ Shadow Duels of the Algerian War in Films by Jean-Marie Straub, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michael Haneke
– Tobias Hering (Curator / Writer / Researcher, Berlin)

Discussant: Andreas Schmiedecker (Writer / Researcher / Teacher, Berlin)
Moderated by Birgit Englert (Universität Wien)

SATURDAY – December 10, 2016

10.15 – 12.00: Figurations of an A-Venir – Film Program 3

Coffee Break

12.15 – 14.15: Operations of Figuration

Relations and Disconnections. The Fragility of Thinking and the Obtuseness of the Aesthetic in Cinematic Experience
– Sudeep Dasgupta (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Psyche and Politics. On Kader Attia’s REASON’S OXYMORONS
– Kathrin Peters (Universität der Künste Berlin)

‘La vraie vie est ailleurs.’ The Figure of the Migrant and the Harraga Phenomenon in Film and Literature
– Réda Bensmaïa (Brown University, Providence)

Discussant: Reinhold Görling (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)
Moderated by Joachim Schätz (Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Wien)

Mezze

English translation will be provided for French and German presentations.

Kontakt

Viktoria Metschl

Forschungsplattform 'Mobile Cultures and Societies', Hofburg, Batthyanystiege 26, A-1010 Wien

viktoria.metschl@univie.ac.at

http://mobilecultures.univie.ac.at/figuration-of-solidarity/