SEMINart

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Once a week SEMINart “living” library opens to the public, including lectures, readings, screenings, discussions etc by the TWIXTlab team and guests. In these independent meetings we explore the relations between contemporary art, the humanities and social reality. The meetings are addressed to anyone interested, regardless of her participation in  TWIXTlab’s other activities.

Spring Semester 2015-2016, SEMINart program:

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Friday 04/03/16

LITERATURE:

Presentation: Paths of the fantastic

Μanos Koumis

It must go further still; that soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turn lamp

William Butler Yeats.

Man took over 20 centuries in order to exit ‘the cave’ Plato condemned him to live in. His emancipation, though, came against the current of Western rationalism, which saw in Fantasy the cause of man’s degradation. This talk, entitled ‘paths of the fantastic’, aims in analyzing the role of Fantasy through man’s history of ideas and in pinpointing its difficult course through modernity. This route’s ‘terminal’ is the rediscovery of Otherness, a concept which Western thought seems to have lost.

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Friday 11/03/16

LITERATURE:

Presentation: E.C. Gonatas’ poetic prose and contemporary Greek short-story writing.

Thanos Kappas

drawing by A. Akrithakis

Short-story writing and poetic quality, nuance and paradox, humor and the unconscious, fantasy and dream elements found in the prose of (very) contemporary Greek short fiction writers. From the prose of E.C. Gonatas to that of Yiannis Palavos, Panos Tsiros, Eva Stefani, Yiorgos Skambardonis etc. Reading of selected passages, convergence and divergence, commenting.

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Friday 18/03/16

LITERATURE:

Presentation: The closed room mystery. Or, Boltzmann’s Disease.

Aris Anagnostopoulos

“Impossible” police stories, usually in the form of “locked-room mysteries” were a paragon of the classic police story developed around the turn of the last century. They were developed simultaneously with groundbreaking ideas in modern physics, with profound cosmological implications. By fragmenting a classical specimen of the genre, The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, we will try to decipher it borrowing clues from the life and ungainly death of the founder of statistical thermodynamics, Ludwig Boltzmann.

Vasily Vereshchagin, 1871,  the apotheosis of war

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Friday 15/04/16

TROUBLESOME REPRESENTATIONS:

Conversation: Artistic Appropriation of the refugee crisis

S. Grigoriadou, P. Petsini, Ε.Rikou

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Friday 22/04/16

TROUBLESOME REPRESENTATIONS:

Presentation: Trophy photography: Lynching mobs, public executions and the camera

Penelope Petsini

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Friday 13/05/16

ON CULTURE

Presentation: Media walks: Technologies, stories and experiences of spatialization

Νikos Bubaris

Drawing on the work of Bernhard Siegert, Raymond Williams και Gunther Kress, the first part of the presentation explores ways in which walking and operational digital media produce synergically cultural techniques, practices and multimodalities. In the second part, this point is further elaborated through an analytical discussion of location-based storytelling and processes of emplacement-displacement that inform the experience of the user. Theoretical points will be illustrated through references to particular works of media walks.

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Friday 20/05/16

ON CULTURE

Presentation: What about old and new challenges of cultural policy?

Myrsini Zorba

Cultural policy has been questioned a lot, both in terms of the necessity of its existence and at the implementation level. However, not only survives on governmental schemes and also takes on new dimensions. Entangled in the maelstrom of cultural wars, reviled, defend or wraps but, mostly, faces challenges.

Friday 27/05/16

Presentation: The artist´s work in contemporary art institutions: from rejection to mediation

Theano Dova

Friday 03/06/16

ON CULTURE

Presentation: Alfred Gell– Timothy Ingold, a dialogue on anthropology, art, materiality and culture

Εleana Yalouri, Εlpida Rikou

We discuss the work of two anthropologists with a significant contribution to issues of material culture. We trace their theoretical origins, we present similarities and differences in their perspectives, we explore their influence today and we seek, through their texts, new ways of approaching art, materiality, culture and anthropology.