03/03/2018
“Manic depression is searching my soul.” On Neoliberalism’s Dominant Structure of Feeling.
Lecture by professor Rudi Laermans and dicussion with Ula Sickle i Agnieszka Sosnowska
- The perspective of the same generation, who came of age in the 1990s—an era of dominant capitalism and the neoliberal economic model become a starting point to takes on board capitalism at the intimate level of our bodies and language. According to Georgio Agamben, we live in times when we have lost our own gestures and paradoxically we have become obsessed with them, as evidenced by selfie culture, online photo banks or the patented system of operating a computer with gestures, developed by Apple. When ideology becomes omnipresent, it begins to seem quasi-natural. What, then, constitutes a counter gesture in a system that has absorbed all opposition?
- Participants
- Rudi Laermans - Professor of Social Theory at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and a regular guest teacher at P.A.R.T.S., the Brussels-based international school for contemporary dance headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. As an academic, he has published widely in both national and international journals and books within the areas of social theory, cultural sociology and the sociology of the arts. Also active as a critic and essayist, he published numerous articles on contemporary dance and is one of the leading voices on, and partly also within, the Flemish dance field.
- Ula Sickle - she comes from a choreographic background. She creates performances and installations as well as works at the interface of disciplines, in which she probes pop culture as a global phenomenon. She frequently ventures beyond the canon of contemporary dance, introducing elements of street dance, club culture or mass concerts. She works closely with DJs and, as with the work Kinshasa Electric, the hip-hop scene in the Congo.
- Agnieszka Sosnowska - researcher and curator at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. She teaches in the Institute of Polish Culture (University of Warsaw), where she defended her PhD dissertation. She’s interested in art practices at the intersection of visual and performing arts, as well as modern theories of theater, performativity, and ephemerality. Selected curatorial work includes A Room and a Half an exhibition by Laura Lima at the Ujazdowski Castle CCA, the Let’s Dance exhibition and performance project in the Art Station Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk, Poznań (co-curated with Joanna Leśnierowska and Tomasz Plata, 2015); Vanishing Point exhibition in Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel (2014); the Polish-Swiss exhibition project Learning from Warsaw (co-curated with Nele Dechmann and Nico Ruffo, 2014) in Museum Baerengasse, Zurich.
Today at U–jazdowski
