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Discussion

Discussion of the Artist Talk, Screening Rosa Barba and Filipa César, ‘Errant Archives’, part of the Symposium Over and Over and Over Again, 17 November 2017, Video Recording, mp4, 23:25 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e171116-2_2>
Baldacci, Cristina Introduction

Cristina Baldacci, Introduction of the Artist Talk, Screening Rosa Barba and Filipa César, ‘Errant Archives’, part of the Symposium Over and Over and Over Again, 17 November 2017, Video Recording, mp4, 13:16 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e171116-2_1>
Errant ArchivesEvent

Barba, Rosa and César, Filipa Errant Archives
Rosa Barba From Source to Poem, 2016 35mm film, colour, optical sound, 12’ From Source to Poem shifts focus from artworks (in her previous works on museum storages) into archival storage. Shot at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia, and at an enormous solar power plant in California, it juxtaposes images from the world’s largest media archive with a study of rhythm and images of cultural and industrial production. Like the temporal property of two things happening at the same time, “the interval determining the coincidence gate is adjustable.” The film exposes the preservation of cultural outputs, but also their digitisation for the future. A vast number of the archives’ holdings is sound material (audio recordings, wax discs, vinyl and LPs); a sonic memory that Barba rescues and mixes in the soundtrack as a way of setting in motion otherwise unlikely dialogues. Rosa Barba is an artist interested in film and the ways in which it articulates space. Composition, physicality of form, and plasticity are important aspects of this articulation, but Barba also interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of mise-en-scène by taking them out of their contexts and restaging them. Her solo exhibitions include: Tate Modern, London (2010); MAXXI, Rome (2014); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2015); CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, and Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2017). Group and large-scale exhibitions include: the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2016), and the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale (2009 and 2015). From Source to Poem is the latest monograph on her work (Hatje Cantz, HangarBicocca, and Malmö Konsthall, 2017). Filipa César The Embassy, 2011 HD, colour, sound, 27' (Directed, produced, photography and editing by Filipa César; written by Armando Lona and Filipa César; performed and narrated by Armando Lona; sound by Nuno da Luz; director’s Assistants: Jorge Biague and Philip Metz; supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin) This film deals with the codes of representation used by the former Portuguese colonial administration in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau, and with modes of memory production. It shows a photo album depicting the perspective of the Portuguese colonist, who photographed landscapes, people, architecture, and monuments in Guinea-Bissau in the 1940s and 1950s, with documentary diligence and the implied violence of objectivation. Intersected by gestures of re-animation, this photo display – handled, flipped through, and re-framed by the hands of the Guinean archivist Armando Lona – is the point of departure for a critical, multi-layered narrative on the common past of these two countries. Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in fictional aspects of the documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and the politics and poetics inherent in the moving image. Since 2011, she has been looking into the origins of the cinema of the African Liberation Movement in Guinea-Bissau as a laboratory of resistance to ruling epistemologies. César premiered her first feature length essay-film Spell Reel at the Forum section of the 67th Berlinale (2017). Selected exhibitions and screenings have taken place at: 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010); Manifesta 8, Cartagena (2010); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011–2015); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012); Khiasma, Paris, (2011–2015); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2013); SAAVY Contemporary, Berlin (2014–2015); Tensta konsthall, Spånga (2015); Mumok, Vienna (2016); Contour 8 Biennial, Mechelen, Gasworks, London, and MoMA, New York (2017).
Discussion

Discussion of the Lecture Sven Lütticken, ‘Trials, Tribunals, Reconstructions’, part of the Symposium Over and Over and Over Again, Video Recording, mp4, 25:50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e171116-1_2>
Nicastro, Clio Introduction

Clio Nicastro, Introduction of the Lecture Sven Lütticken, ‘Trials, Tribunals, Reconstructions’, part of the Symposium Over and Over and Over Again, Video Recording, mp4, 07:01 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e171116-1_1>
Lütticken, Sven Trials, Tribunals, Reconstructions
This talk discusses reenactment strategies in the context of legal and paralegal reconstructions. The theatrical side of court cases has been recognized by a number of scholars and artists, as has the increasing importance of media such as video and digital simulations. As crime scenes are reconstructed and crimes reenacted, such theatrical restagings are not necessarily limited to “proper” legal frameworks. Activist trials and reenactments by activists, artists, and filmmakers introduce a paralegal performativity that may function as a “preenactment” of actual trials to come. From Pierre Huyghe to the Friends of Halit, Forensic Architecture to the tribunal NSU-Komplex, Lütticken will discuss cases in which reenactments are presented as evidence either of a personal and oneiric truth, or of actual events whose reconstruction can challenge official claims. Sven Lütticken teaches art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and theory at the Dutch Art Institute. He is the author of Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art (2006), Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle (2009), History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (2013), and Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (2017), and regularly contributes to journals and magazines such as New Left Review, Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal, Grey Room, and Afterall.
Baldacci, Cristina Introduction

Cristina Baldacci, Introduction of the Symposium Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ICI Berlin, 16 November 2017, Video Recording, mp4, 2:53 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e171116-02>
Sforzini, Arianna Introduction

Arianna Sforzini, Introduction of the Symposium Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ICI Berlin, 16 November 2017, Video Recording, mp4, 10:06 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e171116-01>
Over and Over and Over AgainEvent

Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory
Since the 1990s, re-enactment has emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Current re-enactments question the ability of the present to unpack, embody, and disentangle the past. Thus, to re-enact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. To re-enact means not to restore but to challenge the past – to not merely repeat it, but to interpret and translate it – in the present and for the present – or for the future. History thereby enters a special temporal dimension, that of a possible and perpetual becoming, opening a space for invention and renewal. The symposium investigates the issue of re-enactment through a discussion at once conceptual and practical. How, and to what extent, does recent history engage in a creative dialogue with a more distant past supposedly reactualized through re-enactment? This process of creative repetition branches out into at least three directions: (1) the return/survival of the past understood as generating meaning and values for both present and potential future/s, in terms of what one could call a symbolic archaeology; (2) an epistemological-axiological challenge to the traditional dichotomy between true and false, original and copy; and (3) a performative bodily practice that physically re-stages events. Methodologically, the notion of re-enactment will be approached from three directions: the archive, the arts, and curatorial practice.
Theory’s Method?Book Section

Marianna Poyares Theory’s Method?: Ethnography and Critical Theory
This chapter addresses the use of ethnographic methods in critical social theory, and the assumption that such methods prove to be useful because they allow the researcher to be closer to ‘matter itself’. Instead, I argue for ethnography from within a framework of historical materialism and social critique, marking the difference between such ‘materialism without matter’, based on Marx’s ‘fetishism of the commodity’, and some strategies of New Materialism. My goal is to situate the uses of ethnography for a transformed consideration of the relation between theory and practice.
On Populist IllusionBook Section

Facundo Vega On Populist Illusion: Impasses of Political Ontology, or How the Ordinary Matters
Amplifying the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, Ernesto Laclau crowns his examination of the blind spots of the Marxist tradition with an encomium of populism. His project to re-centre ‘the political’ does not postulate a beginning marked by a great event. Instead, Laclau celebrates ontological foundation as the abyss of all politicity. This chapter critically assesses how Laclau invests the body of the populist leader with an extra-quotidian character. I will also show how the assumption that the body of the leader animates political beginnings and primordially channels them restrains Laclau’s previous ‘deepening of the materialist project’.
The Historicity of Materialism and the Critique of PoliticsBook Section

Alex Demirović The Historicity of Materialism and the Critique of Politics
This chapter proposes one definition of critical materialism and a critique of politics based on several authors from Marx to Foucault. This critique occurs in several stages and unfolds as a criticism of universals such as human freedom, general interest, political rationality, or reconciled political community. The decisive materialist-historical question, then, is which of the different materialities is dominant at a certain point of time. I argue that Marx condemns politics as an illusion. He thought of ‘political reason’ as a form of ‘spiritualism’. Hence, critical materialism argues for a move away from the illusion of politics.