Border Aesthetics Final Conference

5-7 September 2012

University of Tromsø, Norway

Registration deadline August 23! Register here.

Programme available here.

Keynotes:

Wednesday, September 5:1715-1830 at room E-0101

* Debra A. Castillo (Cornell University): "Rasquache Mockumentary: Alex Rivera’s ‘Why Cybraceros?’" 

Thursday, September 6:1045-1200 at room E-0101

* Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (University of Southampton): "From Border Communities to Networks and Neighbourhoods: Re-imagining Europe in the 21st Century"

Friday, September 7:1045 - 1200 at room E-0101

* Frederik Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen): "Credit Crunch. Re-negotiating the Border between Fiction and Reality"

Resident artists:

Thursday, September 6:1800 - 1900 at Tromsø Art Society (Kunstforeninga), city centre

* Presentation by Russian artist group "Chto Delat? / What is to be Done?"

Culture panel:

Friday, September 7: 1300-1430 at room E-0101

* Participants: Knut Erik Jensen (filmmaker), Liv Lundberg (poet), Liv-Hanne Haugen (dance artist), and Luba Kuzovnikova (artist collective Pikene på Broen)

Participation in keynotes, culture panel, and artistic presentation is open to all and does not require registration.

Scope of conference:

This conference will investigate how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting aesthetic practices. In so doing, it draws upon two guiding observations that must inform any notion of a border aesthetics, these being a) that aesthetic theories and practices regularly invoke and engage with notions of the border; and b) that borders are in turn capable of producing aesthetic effects and can themselves be conceived of as aesthetic objects. Papers can focus on the literature, film, photography, visual design, urban planning, and video art to name but a few examples. Also work produced by creative artists working in or imagining border regions will be welcomed. In particular, the Barents Region and the Mediterranean are important areas of study but we also will consider – and encourage – investigations of other regions.

Our concentration on border regions enables the Conference not only to explore and develop further the relatively new field of migratory aesthetics, but it will also formulate what might provisionally be called a zonal aesthetics. Indeed, one of its principal goals will be precisely to establish how a new ‘aesthetics of space’ of a kind likely to be required by the study of the divergent groups, objects, values and activities that inhabit and pass through border zones can be described, explained, negotiated, and evaluated.

In the process, the conference will explicitly address the question of how aesthetic activity participates in the processes by which people relate to the real and conceptual geographies in which they live and through which they move. This focus is both socially engaged and inquisitive about the dynamic ways in which cultural phenomena are ascribed value through aesthetic practice. At the same time, it situates the conference at the vanguard of current thinking about aesthetics.

See our Website for a full account of our project and our past activities.