Space & Place
Faculty Conveners
- Sonja Kuftinec, Theatre Arts and Dance
- Jani Scandura, English
- Karen Till, Geography
- Margaret Werry, Theatre Arts and Dance
Overview
Space&Place is a translocal intellectual and creative collaborative, founded in 1999 and based at University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts. Our experimental forum bridges the methods, concerns, theories and practices of the Humanities, Fine and Performing Arts, and Social Sciences through a focus on space and place. We understand space and place as broad and mobile concepts that are not easily fixed or fixable within existing disciplinary, artistic, geographic and temporal boundaries. Our creative and intellectual explorations of these concepts move between and across institutional frames to redefine the practices, performances and representations of interdisciplinarity. Our forum is therefore multi-modal and process-driven, shaped by an international membership and grounded in feminist politics and practices.
Our Philosophy
Space&Place considers theory and praxis—intellectual, aesthetic, artistic, pedagogical, activist—as intricately interwoven engagements. We experiment with concepts, modes and embodiments of knowledge, art and action, as they are related to space and place. To interrogate how we work through our engagements, our conversations shift venues and our collaborations are multi-sited. We understand our work as interdisciplinary mappings-in-action that are porous, non-hierarchical and translocal.
Thematic Focus 2005-2008
Memory Matters: echoes, motion, states
Memory matters, that is, it has significance in contemporary art, politics and theory. Additionally, memory can be understood through its matters—the materials, detritus, objects, sites, technologies and things associated with the work of memory. Our thematic focus revisits a question that activists, artists and scholars alike have pondered in distinctly situated locales and with respect to particular modernities: How do people negotiate the temporal and spatial landscapes of becoming and being subjects in and through memory and forgetting?
Our sub-themes-echoes, motion, states-highlight the changing relationships among space, place, and time to foreground the limitations of dualistic thinking about matter and memory. The echo, as a sensory, gendered, and spatial phenomenon, might be thought of as a model for trauma, desire, and immateriality that evokes less spoken language than the abstraction of sound. Motion is understood in modern physics and philosophy as the means through which to negotiate relations between space, time, matter and bodies. Often it is memory (and remembrance) that serves to bridge bodies in motion and through emotion. Memory also resonates through states-physical, biological, affective, temporal and spatial-and through geopolitical States, and political processes and organizations more generally. Attending to the states and States of globalization, neoliberalism and cosmopolitanism means to listen to the ghosts, silences and subjects of nationhood, and to (re)witness the violences and pleasures of attachments and displacements.
Over the next three years, our events, venues and conversations will engage these themes, as well as the following related topics: sound; testimony; conflict-transformation, transitional justice and performance; traveling and tourism; new materialities; and ethics.
2007–08 Program
October 26, 2007 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Walid Raad and Iris Haüssler: Performing the Archive, Placing the Past
InFlux, Regis Centre
Performers, visual artists, and animators of imagined pasts, Raad and Haüssler play on the unstable boundary between artistic fact and historical fiction.
"I couldn't have done that!"
Haüssler talks about The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach, an elaborate installation archiving the life and work of an artist who never existed, and raising questions about art, authenticity, and authority in the process.
"My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair"
Raad investigates the events and experiences surrounding the use of car bombs in the 1975-1991 Lebanese wars, in this mixed media performance from the Atlas Group's multi-volume project. Performers, visual artists, and animators of imagined pasts, Raad and Haüssler play on the unstable boundary between artistic fact and historical fiction.
Followed by a reception
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Institute for Global Studies, Walker Art Centre, Department of Art, Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, Centre for German and European Studies.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007 4:00 p.m.
Suzanne Lacy, "Art in the Public Interest: New Artistic Strategies"
125 Nolte
Suzanne Lacy is an internationally acclaimed multi-media and installation public artist and Chair of the new MFA in Public Practice at Otis College of Art and Design.
Sponsored by IAS. Refreshments will be served.
Friday, November 16, 2007 3:30 - 4:30 p.m.
445 Blegen Hall
Space&Place Walk with
Luke Dickens, "Pictures on Walls: post-graffiti, cultural industry and the city"
Luke Dickens is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London and is currently a pre-post-doc at the Graduate School at CUNY. For an abstract of the paper, click on the title.
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Geography and IGS. Refreshments will be served at 3:15; talk begins at 3:30.
Thursday, December 6, 2007 6:30 p.m.
Franklin Art Works
Public Symposium with
Artist Nicola Lopez and Brenda Kayzar, Department of Geography
Nicola Lopez, a multi-media installation artist will speak in conversation with Geographer Brenda Kayzar on such themes as space and sprawl. For information about the artist see: http://nicolalopez.com/.
Directions can be found at FAW webpage: http://www.franklinartworks.org/
Friday, December 7, 2007 3:30-4:30 p.m.
445 Blegen Hall
Space&Place Walk with
Karen E. Till, “Conceptual Mappings and Wounded Cities: Artistic and Activist Displacements”
Karen Till is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and co-director of the Space&Place research collaborative at UMN. Click on the title for an abstract of the presentation.
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Geography and IGS. Refreshments will be served at 3:15; talk begins at 3:30.