[ecrea] CfP: Critical Practices and Experimentation

Call for Papers

CRITICAL PRACTICES AND EXPERIMENTATION

A workshop hosted by the European collaborative project Culture@Work

Copenhagen, April 24-25, 2014

Deadline for submissions: March 3rd, 2014

Throughout the twentieth century, social critique and critical theory 
have informed a powerful thrust of thinking and agency not only in the 
field of political activism proper, but also in a wide array of cultural 
and artistic projects and undertakings, placing us by now at the cusp of 
an entire tradition of critical art, critical scholarship, critical 
pedagogy, critical curating, and so on. Contemporary critical practices 
have developed new formats and modalities of work, often by propagating 
cross-disciplinary ventures, by blurring the boundaries between arts and 
research and by instigating new collective research platforms.

With this workshop, we will put focus on the idea of the experiment and 
the ways in which experimentation stands out as a distinctive feature in 
today’s critical art, research and curating. We will depart from the 
question: What is an experiment? How do experimental protocols and 
practices translate between sciences, humanities and art practices? How 
do we set up and articulate composite and transversal objects of concern 
in creation, scholarship, and exhibition? Which are the institutional 
and disciplinary affordances for experimentation, and what are the 
critical histories in which there are inscribed? Which constraints 
hinder such translation? And, conversely, which venues and platforms 
might facilitate research and creation of an experimental mold?

A particular emphasis will be put on the spaces of critical experimental 
practices, that is, the many different locations where critical work 
unfolds: public spaces, art spaces, schools and universities, cultural 
institutions and so forth, in their variegated material manifestations, 
as well as the symbolic, epistemological and imaginary spaces they 
incarnate. Moreover, in addition to understanding these spaces in their 
actual forms and in the dense historical heritage they embody, we are 
interested in the new interfaces opening up between these spaces, 
ranging from actual exchanges to virtual encounters. We will examine how 
traditional spaces of critical experimentation are being put to work in 
new ways, giving momentum to investigative interrelations and couplings 
in the field.

*

The workshop is the first of two gatherings organised by the 
“Culture@Work”-network, a joint European project aimed at gauging how 
contemporary culture is put to work in new contexts. The network is 
founded by the School of Human Sciences at the Catholic University of 
Portugal (The Lisbon Consortium) in collaboration with the Barcelona 
Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), The National Archive of Literature, 
Luxembourg, and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the 
University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The second workshop will be held at 
MacBa in Barcelona in February 2015.

The Copenhagen workshop is co-sponsored by Université de Paris VIII – 
St. Denis within the framework of the European Network for Cultural Studies.

*

The workshop will feature public lectures and presentations by Carles 
Guerra(Barcelona), Irit Rogoff (London), Lars Bang Larsen (Copenhagen), 
Antony Hudek (Liverpool) and Tania Ruiz Gutierrez (Paris).

On the second day of the conference, a number of parallel working groups 
will be organised on the backdrop of the input provided by the submitted 
proposals from the participants. The group sessions will be based on 
presentations and discussions, but will also involve an aspect of 
production, as the groups will present their findings in a final plenary 
discussion, paving way for a concluding debate and the formulation of 
the intellectual agenda of workshop II, to take place in Barcelona in 
February 2015.

Submissions

Participants are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute contributions 
to the working groups on the second day of the conference. In addition 
to the traditional academic paper format, we welcome performative work, 
presentation of relevant material for discussion, screenings, etc. 
Please include a 300 word abstract of your contribution and a short 
description of your work when applying.

Submission deadline is March 3, 2014. For submissions and queries, send 
an email to (critical.experimentation /at/ gmail.com)

There will be a limited number of EU sponsored grants for travel and 
accommodation costs for participants from the partner institutions, 
please indicate if you will also apply for the grant.

More information at http://lisbonconsortium.wordpress.com/culturework/.

The Culture@Work project is co-funded by the Culture Programme of the 
European Union.

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