[ecrea] CfP: The Body in Catalan Visual Culture

http://dislocationsbodyandart.wordpress.com/conference/

Call for Papers: The Body in Catalan Visual Culture

Action Art, Performance, Dance, Cinema and Plastic and Visual Arts

5 – 7 September 2013

University College Cork, Ireland

Confirmed guest speakers and artists:

Pilar Parcerisas art critic, curator and scriptwriter. Executive Board 
Member of the Consell Nacional de la Cultura i les Arts (CoNCA)

Marcel·lí Antúnez performance artist

Eulàlia Valldosera visual artist

Pere Salabert Chair of Aesthetics and Art Theory, Universitat de Barcelona

While the representation of the human body has been a recurrent motif in 
visual art across cultures and civilizations over the centuries, the 
study of corporeality has traditionally been associated with the natural 
sciences. The publication, in the 1990s, of groundbreaking books such as 
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies 
(1994) and Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects (1994) undoubtedly helped 
redress this imbalance and generated, in turn, a growing interest in the 
re-thinking of the body across disciplines in the humanities and social 
sciences. These theorists located the material body in relation to its 
socio-political context and addressed questions about sexuality, gender 
and race while highlighting the potential of bodies to challenge or 
subvert the very social, cultural and political discourses that shape 
them into ideal form. This shift in focus has also been observed in the 
field of Catalan Studies, where scholars are increasingly attending to 
questions of gender and national identity, corporeality and embodiment, 
particularly with regard to literature and film. Despite this relatively 
recent upsurge in this area of study, scholarly investigation of bodily 
matters in Catalan artistic expression remains very much in its infancy.

Images of the body, performance, ritual and dance have been – and remain 
– core elements and activities in the production of visual and popular 
festive culture in Catalonia. Such corporeal utterances, iterations and 
figurations have also played a symbolic role in processes of identity 
formation. The solemn depictions of the Christ in Majesty in Romanesque 
art or the grotesque bodies carved in many of the capitols of medieval 
monasteries might evince the social hierarchies and theological concerns 
of the times yet they are also inextricably bound to a period in history 
when the Catalan nation was being forged. In the modern era, 
representations of the female body by nineteenth-century Modernista 
artists conveyed ideas about modernity, industrialisation and progress, 
whereas the more normative Noucentistes would later ascribe to the 
female nude a set of classical, civic and urban values. With the advent 
of the avant-garde movements, surrealism and its endless manipulation 
and fragmentation of the body, or the move towards abstraction and 
conceptual art, the representation of corporeality in art became less 
specific, and more ‘implied’. From the mid-1960s Catalan visual and 
performance artists have favoured less defined, unshapely or open-ended 
forms of expression. These have often been read as symptomatic of a 
fraying in dominant models of understanding identity, society and 
culture. Recent secessionist movements in Catalonia caused by a 
combination of historical grievances and a profound economic crisis will 
no doubt provoke further social, political and cultural realignments.

This three-day interdisciplinary conference seeks to foster dialogue 
between artists, curators, art critics, researchers and audiences about 
questions of embodiment, performance and body-representation across 
centuries of Catalan visual and performance art.

Proposals are sought for 20 minutes papers. Possible topics may include 
(but are not limited to) the following:

• Issues of representation • Body theory • Body and identity

• Embodiment • Gender and sexuality • Absence and presence • Ritual

• Phenomenology • Taboo • Performance and action art • Body limits

• Transient bodies • Monstrousness and the grotesque • Violence

• Sensuous and sentient bodies • Body and space

Please send 200-word abstracts in English or in Catalan, a short 
biographical note (max. 100 words) indicating your name, affiliation and 
all relevant contact information to Eva Bru-Domínguez at 
(bodycatalanart /at/ gmail.com) by Friday 31 May 2013. Notification of 
acceptance of proposals will be communicated by mid-June.

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