The Enacting Body as ‘Extra Medium’. Emancipatory Aesthetics and the Dialectics of Visibility in the 1960s and 1970s

In the 1960s and 1970s, existentialist, phenomenological and anti-colonial positions, such as Frantz Fanon’s reflections on the racialized subject moving between the “dialectic of the body and of the world” (1965), were reconfiguring concepts of perception, subjectivity and politics. In the same years, artists started to question standardized regimes of visibility and rethought their own aesthetic practices as radical existential practices. Artists such as Katalin Ladik, Petr Štembera, Valie Export, and Adrian Piper made new use of “extra media” (Crispolti 1978) and adapted their bodies as sites of reflective emancipation and self-critical and subversive contestation.

Following a growing interest in and availability of the archives of  the 1960s and 1970s, and a broadening of the art historical as well as philosophical canon, this transdisciplinary workshop gathers scholars and artists to collectively investigate the aesthetic forms of ‘extra media’, transmission and enactment. Emphasising how the conjunction of the written page, the verbalized sound and the enacting body allowed artistic labour, emancipation and political practice to coincide, twelve speakers will discuss artistic, critical and political mediation. During two days, they will explore if and to what extent aesthetic practices possess transformative potential and what the legacy of these practices can tell us about the escalating co-dependence of technology and subjectivity in today’s world, where authoritarian structures are on the rise.

DAY 1 — Monday, SEPTEMBER 14

14:00–14:20    Welcome and Introduction 
Hana Gründler and Frida Sandström 

Montage and the Mediation of Subjectivity 
Chair: Laura Valterio
14:20–14:50   Jasmina Čubrilo: “Enacted Visibilities: Photography and the Making of Female Subjectivity in Goranka Matić’s Belgrade: Portrait of Women”
14:50–15:20   Kylie Gilchrist: “Operationalizing the Body: Feedback in Nil Yalter's Video Art, 1974–81”
15:20–15:50   Elena Zanichelli: “The Body as Extra-Ordinary Medium: Feminist Montage and Reproductive Incongruity in Anita Steckel”

15:50–16:20   Break

16:20–17:30   Common Reading Session (in situ only)

17:30–18:00   Break

Social Reproduction and Gendered Transformation 
Chair: Rosa Sancarlo
18:00–18:30   Lisa Andreani: “The Collective Body as Medium: Alberto Grifi’s Cinema between Media Technology and Social Transformation”
18:30–19:00   Leopoldina Fortunati: “The Irruption of the Body onto the Political Scene of the 1960s–70s”
19:00–19:30   Andreas Petrossiants: “Contesting Value’s Reproduction: Assembly Line or Circulation Struggle?”

19:30–20:30   Dinner (for speakers only)

20:30–21:30   Eccentric Bodies in Florence: Dérive 

DAY 2 — TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

Feminist Bodies and Media Temporalities 
Chair: Martina Pace
9:00–9:30   Hannah Bruckmüller: “Now-Instants and Little Nothings: The Enacting Body in the Work of Clarice Lispector and Mira Schendel”
09:30–10:00   Regina Karl: “Manipulating Visibility: Touch and Mediation in VALIE EXPORT’s Tapp- und Tastkino”
10:00–10:30   Roberta Minnucci: “Recording the Body: Performing Female Subjectivity in Le Nemesiache”

10:30–10:45   Break

Acoustic Embodiment and Oral Enactment 
Chair: Oliver Aas
10:45–11:15   Mersid Ramicevic: “Voices of the Incomplete: Lulu’s Torso, Technical Reproduction, and the Enacting Body, 1949–1979”
11:15–11:45   Ina Blom: “Rectilinear Invisibility: Following Technical Infrastructure ca 1960”
11:45–12:15   Nam Huh: “Acoustic Refusals: Transnational Somatic and Phonic Friction in the 1970s Works of Han Ok-hee and Katalin Ladik”

12:15–13:15   Tea Time (for speakers only)

13:15–14:15   Roundtable: Gender, Aesthetics and Technology (in situ only)
Moderated by Hana Gründler and Frida Sandström