Research Workshop (A4) – The figures of language, the language of figures

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THE FIGURES OF LANGUAGE, THE LANGUAGE OF FIGURES

– Research Workshop –

 

On Monday, May 8, 2016, 17.00-19.00, the Center of Excellence in Image Studies (CESI), University of Bucharest, will be hosting the research workshop “The Figures of Language, the Language of Figures”. The event will take place in the Conference Room of CESI, 5 Mihail Moxa Street, as part of the research project “Figura – Body, Art, Space, Language” funded by UEFISCDI through the “Young Research Teams” program (PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-0787), currently underway at CESI.

The figure in language is the last of the four directions opened for exploration by the team members and their guests in the project’s series of research workshops. During this last workshop dealing with the status and functioning of the figure within language but also with the various theoretical discourses at work in approaching this subject, Adrian Tudurachi will follow several attempts at articulating contemporary redefinitions of the figure that go beyond the traditional rhetorical perspective. This undertaking examines the influence exerted by artistic practices (photography, montage) and philosophical reflection (Lyotard’s, Deleuze’s, and Didi-Huberman’s work on figurability and the figural, the notion of apparatus as developed by Foucault and Agamben) upon the process of rethinking the figure within language not in textual terms, as it has been the case in traditional approaches, but in visual terms instead. This insight into the visual culture’s impact on the reconsideration of the figure within language will gain more depth through the intervention of Chris Tănăsescu, founding member of the multi(-digital-)media poetry, painting/video, and music band MARGENTO. He is also an interdisciplinary researcher of literature, currently in charge with the new Digital Humanities program at the University of Ottawa.

Adrian Tudurachi is a literary critic and historian, currently Deputy Director of the “Sextil Puşcariu” Institute of Linguistics and Literary History (Cluj-Napoca). In 2005 he obtained his PhD in Literary Studies with a thesis on Mihail Dragomirescu’s poetics, later published as Destinul precar al ideilor literare (2006). His research interests include modern literary ideologies and the relation between the experience of literary forms and the social representations of literature. He has edited collective volumes (Dus-întors. Rute ale teoriei literare în postmodernitate, together with Oana Fotache and Magda Răduţă, 2016), as well as special issues of academic journals. He is the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Dacoromania litteraria edited by the Cluj-Napoca branch of the Romanian Academy, while also being a member of the editorial boards of other publications, such as RiCognizioni. Rivista di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne and Transylvanian Review. He is the author of several important scientific studies. His most recent book is Fabrica de geniu. Naşterea unei mitologii a productivităţii literare în cultura română, 1825-1875 (2016).

Chris Tănăsescu (alias MARGENTO) is a poet, performer, critic, and translator. He holds a PhD in Literary Studies, as well as a BA in informatics. A professor of contemporary American poetry, digital humanities, creative writing, and natural language processing, he taught at the University of Bucharest, San Diego State University, Tan Tao University, and Université Paris 10, and was a guest speaker at conferences in Europe, North America, and Asia. Chris has authored, translated, or edited more than 20 volumes and (co-)authored hundreds of literary and academic articles. As a founding member of the multi(-digital-)media poetry, painting/video, and music band MARGENTO, he won the Fringiest Event Award (Buxton Fringe, UK, 2005), the press’ mention (Adelaide Fringe, Australia, 2006), and The Golden Record (Romania, 2008). He opened the first edition of Euro Poetry Slam Festival (Berlin, 2009) and was invited to perform at the E-Poetry World Festival (London, 2013), as well as in the CROWD Omnibus Literary Tour (Germany and Austria, 2016). Chris is currently conducting a funded research within the Computer Science Department at the University of Ottawa, where he is developing the Graph Poem project. He is also the director of the new Digital Humanities program at the same university and editor-at-large of the literary magazine Asymptote for Romania and Moldavia.

“The Figures of Language, the Language of Figures” is the last in a series of four research workshops within the project “Figura – Body, Art, Space, Language”. Their common goal is twofold: to identify new regimes of the figure through the analysis of contemporary visual objects, and to stress the interdisciplinary potential of the concept of figure in relation to the body, art, space, and language.

Research team: Laura Marin (PhD), Anca Diaconu (Băicoianu) (PhD), Vlad Ionescu (PhD), Andrei Lazăr (PhD), Alexandra Irimia (PhD student), Alina Mihai (PhD student), and Alex Maxim (project technician).

Website: figura.unibuc.ro

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Research Workshop (A3) – Painting the Figure. Figurative and Figural Regimes of Representation

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PAINTING THE FIGURE.

FIGURATIVE AND FIGURAL REGIMES OF REPRESENTATION

Research Workshop

 

On Monday, November 14, 2016, 17.00-19.00, the Center of Excellence in Image Studies (CESI), University of Bucharest, will host the research workshop “Painting the Figure. Figurative and Figural Regimes of Representation”. The event will take place in the Conference Room of CESI, 5 Mihail Moxa Street, as part of the research project “Figura – Body, Art, Space, Language” funded by UEFISCDI through the “Young Research Teams” program (PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-0787), currently underway at CESI.

By means of this workshop, the research team, together with the guest lecturer Kamini Vellodi in dialogue with project team member Vlad Ionescu, will explore Jean-Francois Lyotard’s conception of the Figure, and its reworking by Gilles Deleuze, through the lens of late 15th century/early 16th century Ferrarese painting.

In the opening pages of Discours Figure (1971), Lyotard presents the Figure as a thickness in discourse, a plastic, spatial, artistic and libidinal event that in its alterity, and in the silence it poses, escapes discourse’s signifying bounds. Deleuze is indebted to this anti-phenomenological and anti-structuralist conception of the figure, applauding Discourse, Figure as “the first generalized critique of the signifier”, whose work performs a critique of the phenomenological matrix of intelligibility that Deleuze, like Lyotard, argues retrieves alterity within the Same. This debt is expressed most clearly in Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981) where Francis Bacon’s Figures are newly conceived as the diagrammatic constructs of sensation that destroy the outlying regime of a discursive figuration.

Deleuze departs, however, from the Freudian apparatus that informs Lyotard’s conception of the Figure. With Guattari, he claims that the critical tenor of Lyotard’s project is limited by the concomitant reintroduction of the psychoanalytical transcendents of Lack and fantasy into desire that maintain the latter under the law of castration. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari propose a pure flow of “machine energy” that “has nothing to do with [the transcendent] ideal of phantasy” but which is rather a “matrix of intensity”, “the field of immanence of desire”, where desire is “a process of production without reference to any exterior agency” of lack or pleasure, a force that “carries us to the gates of schizophrenia as a process”.

In this workshop, Kamini Vellodi will address this Deleuzian reframing of the figure, the conception of desire it implicates, and the idea of art it projects through precise attention to selected works from the late 15th century/early 16th century Ferrarese school of painting. In the works of Cosme Tura, Ercole de Roberti and Dosso Dossi, we encounter what Lyotard called the “gesticulatory expanse” of the Figure, a constructive motility that bears witness to a differing outside the significations bound by textual determination, a painterly madness that casts new light on the long acknowledged view of the “bizarre” and “eccentric” nature of this curious school whilst obviating the art historical conventions of an iconographic approach. In response, Vlad Ionescu will trace the genealogy of the figural and test its applicability in the field of conceptual arts, an area that has not yet been thoroughly researched. Gilles Deleuze, in Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981) reintroduces the notion of the figural in the context of the analysis of painting. However, while in Lyotard the notion was analyzed according to its broader epistemological scope, Deleuze develops its potential in the field of painting. In this sense, for both Lyotard and Deleuze the figural denotes the process in which forces determine representation. In the transference of a three-dimensional object, with its density and presence, onto a two-dimensional surface the object is adjusted to a system of rules that define any discursive formation. The perspective in painting and the syntax in languages are such discursive formations because they subordinate the objects that they represent to this inherent system. The figural functions as a critical notion in the sense that it traces the dogmatic limits of representation. On the one hand, any system of rules is an exercise of power because it represents by delimiting what can be represented and what is to be left outside the field of representation. On the other hand, the figural denotes the unconscious and forces that – in the dream-work and in the artwork – transgresses the preexisting system of rules. However, for Lyotard, the relation between figure and discourse is negative and dialectic, meaning that analysis can show how discourses generate figural effects and how figures are emulated into discourses. Lytoard discusses this dialectics with concrete examples: on a manifest level, the dream-work and the rebus are instances that are narrated and are subordinated to discursive rules. However, on a latent level, their analysis detects the visual and libidinal forces on which this subordination takes place.

Dr. Kamini Vellodi is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter. She works on the methodological and conceptual intersections between contemporary continental philosophy and art history, currently with a focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze. She has published in journals including Art History, Parrhessia and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and is currently completing her book Tintoretto’s Difference – a study of the 16th century painter through the lens of Deleuze’s philosophy of the diagram – for Bloomsbury Press. She is also currently working on a critique of the concept of anachronism in art history. Kamini is also a practising artist, and has exhibited widely, including in the Sammlung Essl (Vienna), Bloomberg Space (London), and Asia House (London). Her work is held in several public and private collections in Europe, India, and London.

Dr. Vlad Ionescu is post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts, University of Hasselt, and a member of the project “Figura – Body, Art, Space, Language” (CESI, University of Bucharest). He read philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven (BA, MA, PhD), and worked as a Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Leiden, Faculty of Architecture (KU Leuven) and at the Performance Arts Research and Training Studio (P.A.R.T.S., Brussels). He has co-translated and co-edited the series Jean-François Lyotard. Writings on Contemporary Arts and Artists/Ecrits sur l’art contemporain et les artistes (Leuven UP). He wrote extensively about the figural in Lyotard and Deleuze. Currently he works on the notion of adaptive re-use and the atlas as a model of design.

“Painting the Figure. Figurative and Figural Regimes of Representation” is the third in a series of four research workshops within the project “Figura – Body, Art, Space, Language”. Their common goal is twofold: to identify new regimes of the figure through the analysis of contemporary visual objects, and to stress the interdisciplinary potential of the concept of figure in relation to the body, art, space, and language.

Research team: Laura Marin (PhD), Anca Băicoianu (PhD), Vlad Ionescu (PhD), Andrei Lazăr (PhD), Alexandra Irimia (PhD student), Alina Vlad (PhD student), and Alex Maxim (project technician).

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Research Workshop (A2) – Mapping Spaces. From Cartographic Configurations to Geographies of Resistance

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MAPPING SPACES

From Cartographic Configurations to Geographies of Resistance

Research Workshop

 

Friday, April 15, 2016, 17.00-19.00, the Center of Excellence in Image Studies (CESI), University of Bucharest, will host the research workshop “Mapping Spaces: From Cartographic Configurations to Geographies of Resistance”. The event will take place in the Conference Room of CESI, 5 Mihail Moxa Street, as part of the research project “Figura – Body, Art, Space, Language” funded by UEFISCDI through the “Young Research Teams” program (PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-0787), currently underway at CESI.

By means of this workshop, the research team, together with the guest lecturer Petruţa Năiduţ in dialogue with project team member Anca Băicoianu, will tackle the connection between figure and space. Starting from the sacred geography of medieval mappaemundi and moving on to the increasingly secular worldview of Renaissance cartography and beyond, this workshop wishes to trace various codes of figuration employed in mapmaking. From the representation of space to the insertion of vignettes and insets, the graphic modalities of medieval and early modern maps reveal a worldview that negotiates meaning between space and social being. The conjunction of the centrality and marginality of figures on the map sets up stories that bear on travel, science and politics and proposes a reading of maps as a complex system of figuration. Building upon such insights, the second part of the workshop will explore some of the recent uses of cartography as a critical and creative tool for contemporary scholars, artists, and curators in the context of today’s “geographies of globalization” (Murray 2005).

Petruţa Năiduţ is an assistant lecturer at the English Department of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, where she teaches translation, early modern and eighteenth-century literature and culture. Her research interests are the history of cartography, cultural and social history, early modern literature and the cartographic imagination.

Anca Băicoianu holds a PhD in Literary Theory from the University of Bucharest, where she is currently employed as a Research Fellow within the project “Figura – Body, Art, Space, Language” (CESI, University of Bucharest). Her published works focus mainly on the processes of identity construction, as well as on the relationships between history, memory and fiction in contemporary literature and the visual arts.

“Mapping Spaces: From Cartographic Configurations to Geographies of Resistance” is the second in a series of four research workshops within the project “Figura – Body, Art, Space, Language”. Their common goal is twofold: to identify new regimes of the figure through the analysis of contemporary visual objects, and to stress the interdisciplinary potential of the concept of figure in relation to the body, art, space, and language.

Research team: Laura Marin (PhD), Anca Băicoianu (PhD), Vlad Ionescu (PhD), Andrei Lazăr (PhD), Alexandra Irimia (PhD student), Alina Vlad (PhD student), and Alex Maxim (project technician).

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Research Workshop (A1) – The Body as Sign in Contemporary Dance

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The Body as Sign in Contemporary Dance Performances

Research Workshop

Our first research workshop will take place on Friday, March 4th 2016, 17:00-19:00, as part of the research project “Figura – body, art, space, language” funded by UEFISCDI through the “Young Research Teams” program, and hosted by the Center of Excellence in Image Studies (CESI), University of Bucharest. Starting from the understanding of the body and its corporeality as a “sign” in contemporary dance performances, our meeting with Andrea Gavriliu and Cristina Modreanu will seek to explore the first axis of our research field, namely the relations between the rhetorical figure and the human body.

 A remarkable actress and choreographer of the new generation, Andrea Gavriliu is known to the national and international public through performances such as Zic Zac (2013, in her own directing), Hotel PM (2015, in her own directing), Disorient Express (2015, in her own directing), Vertigo (2015, directed by Mihai Măniuțiu), 3 Hours After Midnight (2015, directed by Mihai Măniuțiu), and Hyokkori Hyotanjima (2015, directed by Kazuyoshi Kushida). She will join us from Sfîntu Gheorghe, where she is currently working on The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky in her own directing, scenography, and choreography.

Cristina Modreanu is a theater critic, curator, and performing arts expert. She is teaching at the Doctoral School “Space, Image, Text, Territory” within the Faculty of Letters/CESI, University of Bucharest. Having authored a great number of Romanian theater studies and being the editor-in-chief of Scena.ro magazine, she enjoys international recognition in the field of contemporary performing arts and performance studies, which she has introduced in Romania for the first time.

The discussions will be accompanied by a selection of video projections from Andrea Gavriliu’s performances, as proposed by Cristina Modreanu.

This event is part of a series of four workshops organized within the project. Their common goal is twofold: to identify new regimes of the figure through the analysis of contemporary visual objects, and to stress the interdisciplinary potential of the concept of figure in its relations with the body, art, space, and language. The workshop is created and organized by the team of the Figura research project (“Figura – body, art, space, language”, PN-II-RU-TE-4-0787) at the Center of Excellence in the Study of Image (CESI), 5 Mihail Moxa Street, the Conference Room, ground floor.

Research team: Laura Marin (PhD), Anca Băicoianu (PhD), Vlad Ionescu (PhD), Andrei Lazăr (PhD), Alexandra Irimia (PhD student), Alina Vlad (PhD student) and Alex Maxim (project technician).

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