Art & Speculative Futures

DAY 1. THURSDAY, 27th OCTOBER.
Venue: CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

8:30 – 9:30
Registration

9:30 – 10:00
Conference opening
Conference chairs: Anna Maria Guasch (UB), Lourdes Cirlot (UB), Pau Alsina (UOC)

10:00 – 11:00
Keynote
Productive failure: Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories
Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Florida International University
Chair: Christian Alonso

11:00 – 11:30
Discussion

11:30 – 12:00
Coffee break

12:00 – 14:00
SESSION A: Cosmopolitism
Chair: Christian Alonso

14:00 – 16:00
Lunch

16:00 – 17:30
Keynote
Formas de vida tecnológicas. Ajustes bio-tecno- políticos y poéticas de la experimentación
Flavia Costa
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Chair: Daniel López del Rincón

17:30 – 18:00
Discussion

18:00 – 20:30
SESSION B: Divergent stories
Chair: Daniel López del Rincón y Víctor Ramírez Tur

Venue: CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

10:00 – 11:30
Keynote
The Cosmopolitical Forest
Ursula Biemann
Artist, Zurich
Chair: Anna Maria Guasch

Response: Luís Guerra y Christian Alonso

11:30 – 12:00
Coffee break

12:00 – 14:00
Round table

14:00 – 16:00
Lunch

16:00 – 18:00
SESSION C.1: Time, Space, Matter
Chair: Vanina Hofman

18:00 – 18:30
Coffee break

18:30 – 20:30
SESSION C.2: Time, Space, Matter
Chair: Débora Lanzeni

Venue: ASM: Arts Santa Mònica

10:00 – 11:30
Keynote
The Cracks of the Contemporary
Rick Dolphijn
Utrecht University
Chair: Pau Alsina

11:30 – 12:00
Coffee break

12:00 – 14:00
SESSION D: New Materialisms and Infrastructures
Chair: Pau Alsina

Dr. Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s art historical scholarship, art criticism, and curating reflect his queer, anti-racist, transnational and practice-led approach to contemporary art. He is director of the MFA in Visual Arts program and an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. This fall, he is Critical Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art where he is delivering two keynote lectures on the subject ‘artistic practice as theory and as entangled with the world’. His monograph ‘Productive failure: Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories’ is forthcoming from Manchester University Press (June 2017). He recently completed research supported by the Fulbright Foundation for his book project Contemporary Eastern European art history: queer practices and transregional frames. In the spring of 2017, he will chair the panel ‘Art History as Créolité/Creolising Art History’ for the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in England. A frequent contributor of exhibition reviews to artforum.com, Dr. Patel has published in Artforum (print), Art in America, hyperallergic.com, and frieze. Click here for more information on the book Creolizing Europe, to which he contributed a chapter related to the topic of the conference.

Dr. Flavia Costa is a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. For over a decade it has been one of the translators of the work of Giorgio Agamben to Spanish. Her research focus is the perspective of modernity as a double trend of modernization process and politicization of life. She published On Bridges and Borders (2014, ed. P. Donoso and S. Vajay) andBiopolitics, medicalization and imperative health(2014 ed.) and other items, including “Life as information, the body as a setting signal: landslides of biopower within the framework of neoliberal governmentality “(2010, with PE Rodriguez), “On the forms of technological life and biopolitical practices” (2012), “Healthy living, Fitness and human capital “(2014),” Forms of technological life: multitasking and flattening “(2014). It is an editorial member of the magazine Artefacto y del colectivo Ludión(www.ludion.com.ar).

Rick Dolphijn is a writer and a philosopher. He teaches and does research at Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities. From 2017 to 2020 he will be Honorary Associate Professor at Hong Kong University (Hong Kong). He wrote Foodscapes, Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (Eburon/University of Chicago Press 2004) and New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press 2012, with Iris van der Tuin). He has recently published This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life (edited by Rosi Braidotti, Brill/Rodopi 2014/5). He writes on the contemporary, on art, theory and politics. Currently he is finishing a new monograph entitled Surfaces: How Philosophy and Art Matter.

Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forest and water, as in the projects Egyptian Chemistry (2012), Deep Weather (2013) and Forest Law (2014) and most recently in Subatlantic (2015 and Biosemiotic Borneo (2016). Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and at international art biennials in Liverpool, Sharjah, Shanghai, Sevilla, Istanbul, Montreal, Venice and Sao Paulo. She had comprehensive solo exhibitions at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Lentos Museum Linz, Bildmuseet Umea, and Helmhaus Zurich. Biemann is part of the collaborative World of Matter project (worldofmatter.net) and received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland. (www.geobodies.org)