Fall Symposium 2024: The Monster Is Us: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Authoritarian Turn

The module Theory and Practice consists of a series of seminars, in which theoretical lectures and artistic exercises complement each other in the teaching process, as well as the biannual symposiums organized at the IAGN each semester. The high degree of independence necessary for a future professional life as an artist can only be built upon a strong self-reliance fostered during one’s studies. Such self-reliance is explicitly expected and regularly reviewed through artistic self-study programmed into the curriculum. A pronounced self-competence is a basic prerequisite such that professional and methodological expertise relating to artistic, technical, and intellectual potential can be channeled into current and future creative processes.

With contributions by Basma al-Sharif, Candice Breitz, Diego Marcon, Ingo Niermann, Tai Shani, Stas Shärifullá (HMOT), Latefa Wiersch, and others

The symposium is open to the public and will be held in English. Free admission.

Amid the unqualified violence of this past year—with genocidal wars waged mostly against civilians—we have been reflecting on the dehumanization and demonization process heralded by such war’s wagers, by despots and democratically elected leaders alike. Antonio Gramsci’s infamous lines, wildly paraphrased, from a fascist prison: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Gramsci’s reflection on the interregnum, a Roman idea of the limbolike moment when legality is suddenly suspended, also suggests the meaning of monster itself, which likely derives from the Latin verb monere, meaning, to warn. An alarm, then.

It seems that we are now in a new time of monsters—as authoritarianism appears to move faster than any progressive sense of solidarity and collective politics can. We’d like to ask you to join us for our two-day fall symposium, The Monster Is Us: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Authoritarian Turn, to be held on 26 and 27 November 2024, in Basel and online, where we will speak together—not as policy makers but as thinkers, artists, performers, writers, and filmmakers—about how our time of shattering violence might be reconsidered and contravened across our practices of living and working and resisting together. When invocations of nonviolence are inevitably used by violent state actors to undermine resistance movements by the most oppressed peoples—and as we turn away from democratic structures toward fascism globally—how to consider the trope and figure of the monster anew, without the flat rhetoric in which it is often cast?

The symposium will be, in a sense, not just about a monstrous moment but devoted to the consideration of a figure that appears without fail in contemporary life, its politics, theories, literatures, cinemas, performances and much else. What role does the monster play in our fictions and images, realities and rhetoric, our senses of self and other? The Monster Is Us: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Authoritarian Turn is part of the biannual symposia series Gender and Equality in the Arts, curated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Ongoing since 2018, the series of symposiums considers artistic practice in its entanglements with power, gender, language, coloniality, and ecology.

The symposium is dedicated to the memory of Mohammed Sami Qariqa.

https://vorlesungsverzeichnis.hgk.fhnw.ch/module/2798

Registration deadline:
31. October 2024