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cover imageWorkshop
The Self at Scale
Why does it seem so productive today to be simultaneously the subject and object of one’s writing? This workshop starts from the premise that certain writing and artistic practices position the theorizing self as a mediator between the subject and larger scales of social organization. The contemporary fascination with autotheory, autofiction, and related genres, such as auto-sociobiography or mythobiography, is a case in point. These forms show the interplay between theorizations of personal life, subjectivity and historical or collective experience. However, these practices also have their own histories. The workshop is therefore interested in the politics and aesthetics of this interplay, in the genealogies of these forms, and in the moments when these practices have intensified. The aim of the workshop is to facilitate dialogue between multiple discourses. One such discourse is feminist theory, which has long offered insights into the concept of the theorizing self as mediator. Another discursive resource is the theory and practice of life writing, from the early 20th century onwards. It is precisely within the space between theory and practice, between history and biography, that the ‘unexpected subject’ can emerge (to borrow the term of Italian critic and theorist Carla Lonzi). Such tension has been framed in works of life writing that deliberately play with the implications of this problem, such as Luisa Passerini’s Autoritratto di gruppo (Autobiography of a Generation, 2008), Annie Ernaux’s Les années (The Years, 2008), the collective autobiography Baby Boomers.Vite parallele dagli anni Cinquanta ai cinquant’anni (written by Rosi Braidotti, Roberta Mazzanti, Serena Sapegno, and Annamaria Tagliavini, 2003), as well as Carla Lonzi’s seminal Autoritratto (Self-portrait, 2022), published in 1969. In other contexts, and in relation to the problems posed by racialization and more recent developments in the conceptualization of sexuality, authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Saidiya Hartman, Sara Ahmed, and Paul B. Preciado, have turned to forms of autotheory to reconsider the relationship between embodied subjectivity, selfhood, and the world. Alongside gender, race, and postcolonial critique, what additional insights could autotheoretical writing offer to a renewed reflection on class, its representations, and its lived contradictions? In what ways do contemporary practices of autotheory preserve, or intentionally erase, a potential space of freedom? Rather than preemptively reading this genre as a symptom of narcissism and self-referentiality, this question aims to explore the reasons behind its attraction for readers and its global success. Traditionally, the ‘freedom’ of the liberal individual is located in the private spheres of the domestic or inner life. However, in a post-Marxist and post-Foucauldian landscape, such spaces of freedom appear to be possible only through the disavowal of one’s social embeddedness. Feminist and critical instances of the practice of autotheory generally aim to open up or create spaces in which a focus on the self functions as an antidote and an alternative to a multiplicity of discourses connected to power. These discourses include the logocentrism of canonical theoretical discourse, in which the abstraction of theory is seen to cloud or obscure specific subject positions, their histories, and their epistemologies. Some of the questions at the heart of this workshop emerged from conversations with students at Bard College Berlin. It is designed to be accessible to students and will bring together scholars, writers, and artists.
2026
cover imageLecture Video
Reigeluth, Tyler The Socio-technical Unconscious of ‘Smart’ Environments
As technological systems become increasingly distributed, embedded, and multiscalar, an ever-larger part of how they function seems to escape human perception and understanding – at least at an individual level. This growing lack of ‘technical culture’ (Gilbert Simondon) reinforces forms of alienation towards technical objects wherein the latter would function automatically and independently. A prevalent critical response to this post-cybernetic situation is to open the black boxes that surround us and mediate people’s lives, in order to reveal how they work, and to reclaim control over them. However, this talk will offer an alternative perspective, inspired by anthropology (André Leroi-Gourhan), geography (Nigel Thrift), and philosophy (Gilbert Simondon, Langdon Winner). This approach can help to understand and to work through the ‘socio-technical unconscious’ that underpins and innerves ‘smart’ systems, and reveals itself through lags, lapses, and breakdowns. Reigeluth will argue that the answer does not lie in the unreasonable and impossible technological expertise and mastery at an individual level, but rather in articulating the ‘geographies of intelligence’ (Simon Schaffer) that these complex technological systems involve yet obfuscate. Drawing on work from infrastructure and maintenance studies, the talk will highlight the collective dimensions that the socio-technical unconscious takes. Tyler Reigeluth is assistant professor in Philosophy at the Université Catholique de Lille, and a member of the ETHICS lab. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2018 where he worked with the Algorithmic Governmentality FNRS-funded research project, and he subsequently carried out postdoctoral research at the Université du Québec à Montréal, the University of Chicago, and the Université de Grenoble-Alpes’ Institute of Philosophy, within the framework of the Ethics & AI Chair. His research combines political theory, philosophy of technology, and STS, and has focused most recently on the relationships between human and machine learning, as well as smart city discourse. He co-edited the book De la ville intelligente à la ville intelligible (2019), co-authored with Thomas Berns Ethique de la communication et de l’information (2021) and published L’Intelligence des villes. Critique d’une transparence sans fin (2023).
2026
cover imageEvent
Panel VI
Panel VI of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ’To Give Body to an Institution’, ICI Berlin, 29 January 2026 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129>
2026
cover imageEvent
Panel V
Panel V of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ’To Give Body to an Institution’, ICI Berlin, 29 January 2026 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129>
2026
cover imageEvent
Panel IV
Panel IV of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ’To Give Body to an Institution’, ICI Berlin, 29 January 2026 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129>
2026
cover imageEvent
Panel III
Panel III of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ’To Give Body to an Institution’, ICI Berlin, 29 January 2026 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129>
2026
cover imageEvent
Panel II
Panel II of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ’To Give Body to an Institution’, ICI Berlin, 29 January 2026 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129>
2026
cover imageEvent
Panel I
Panel I of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ’To Give Body to an Institution’, ICI Berlin, 29 January 2026 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129>
2026
cover imageBook Section
Marcela Santander Recensão a Stella do Patrocínio, Falatório / Chatter, de Iracema Dulley e Marlon Miguel, eds.
Marcela Santander, ‘Recensão a Stella do Patrocínio, Falatório / Chatter, ed. Iracema Dulley e Marlon Miguel’, Práticas Da História. Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past, 21 (2025), pp. 407–13
2025
cover imageBook
Performing Embodiment: Choreographies of Affect, Language, and Social Norms Ed. by Alberica Bazzoni and Federica Buongiorno
Combining the notions of performativity and embodiment, this book situates the body in the realm of processes, movement, and poiesis, seeking to generate alternative configurations to mind–body dualism. Focused on language, literature, dance, affect, gender, sport, and disability, the contributions to this volume emphasize doing over being: the body does and is done; it is engaged in a movement of co-constitution with the world. It is in doing that bodies produce knowledge and shared or contested social meaning. Such a relational process is best described through the notion of choreographies — patterns of movement which capture the embodied dynamic of passivity and activity, design and improvisation, inner and outer states, and which fittingly describe the modalities through which social norms discipline bodies, or are challenged by them.
2026 | Cultural Inquiry, 39. embodiment; phenomenology; performativity; mind-body dualism; lived body; relationality; affect; choreography; embodied language; situated knowledge
cover imageBook Section
Chiara Montalti Choreographies of Knowledge: Mis/fitting in Academia
In this chapter, I read academia as a landscape in which certain choreographies are enacted and reinforced. The expectations that our bodyminds are normally required to meet are staged in these choreographies, but how is an appropriate academic identity supposed to be shaped? Firstly, I challenge the idea that intellectual work is carried out by somewhat disembodied subjects. Secondly, I address how academic structures require certain attitudes, capacities, and rhythms, considering three aspects in particular: 1) time; 2) space; and 3) rhetorical skills. I then highlight how the standards examined lead to the exclusion and marginalization of bodyminds perceived as ‘asynchronous’, and how this determines an epistemological failure. Plural forms of participation, experience, and bodyminds are an asset that is lost. The very ‘misfit’ between subjects and academia can help disclose the necessity to craft new paths: I suggest some practical proposals that can reorient us towards more sustainable and diverse choreographies. Throughout the essay, I mainly refer to analyses proposed by disability and neurodiversity studies and feminist theory.
2026. time; space; productivity; rhetoric; disability studies; conferences; body
cover imageLecture Video
Messeri, Lisa 1:1 – Drawn to Scale
This talk explores scale and simulation. In the scientific context, simulations are often epistemic tools that can be larger or smaller or faster or slower than the target of study. But in cases where the thing of interest is that which is remote or inaccessible, the scale is simply 1:1. How ought we think about simulations that are drawn to scale; simulations that claim to be a faithful replication of the real thing? Lisa Messeri draws on three examples of simulation from her research as an anthropologist of science and technology: a landscape on Earth meant to simulate a landscape on Mars, a virtual reality experience meant to simulate being in a different body, a large language model meant to simulate being in conversation with another human. While simulations are generally accepted as intentional fabrications of the real, there is something tricky about the 1:1 scale. Those fabricating and experiencing this scale often desire to forget that the simulation is meant to be ‘like’ something else, wondering if it might simply ‘be’ that other thing. Each of the cases teases out a different hazard of these 1:1 simulations, as well as the pleasures that come from engaging with things at scale. Lisa Messeri is an associate professor at Yale University, specializing in the anthropology of science and technology. Her research focuses on the norms, aspirations, and consequences of work done by expert communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention. She is the author of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds(Duke University Press, 2016) as well as In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2024). Her research has been covered in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Wired, Forbes, Scientific American. She is currently researching the epistemic risks that AI holds for the scientific enterprise.
2026
cover imageDiscussion Video
Biomedical Visions: The Art of Science and the Science of Art
Biomedical visualisations can validate patient experiences and perceptions empowering patients and convincing doctors in the search for a diagnosis, treatment, or cure. However, they are often deceptive and of questionable legibility. They are also inaccessible to non-specialists and often de-contextualized. This can lead to epistemic uncertainty, overdiagnosis, unnecessary interventions, healthcare inequalities, and epistemic or social injustice. The discussion builds on, but aims to go beyond the analysis of the creation and use of images in biomedical knowledge and practice as well as their social conditions and consequences. The panelists are interested in how images in the context of biomedicine can be interpreted and used by patients, artists, and scholars, and how new visual languages can be created to intervene in biomedical and public discourse. This shift in focus highlights the various forms of knowledge and expertise that exist beyond the realm of scientific and clinical specialists and that can inform and enrich biomedicine. This conversation began in April 2023 as part of the research group Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. At the time, Alfred Freeborn and Elizabeth Hughes invited 30 academic researchers, artists, activists, and medical professionals to form interdisciplinary groups and present their preliminary projects in a workshop in September 2024. The first output of this work was the edited, open access volume Biomedical Visions: Epistemology, Medicine and Art Practice (Hatje Cantz, 2025). This discussion aims to reflect on results so far and continue the discussion in a public forum, focusing particularly on the intended and unintended audiences of biomedical visualisations, patient activism, and artwork based on science.
2026
cover imageDiscussion, Screening Video
Attia, Kader and Maas, Wietske Unwalling the Psyche
Artist Kader Attia and curator Wietske Maas will discuss fragments from Attia’s film installations Reason’s Oxymorons (2015) and The Body’s Legacies, Pt. 2: The Postcolonial Body (2018). They will also reflect on the collective experience of La Colonie, a decolonial space for debate, education, and conviviality founded by Attia in Paris in 2016. Since the pandemic, La Colonie has continued as a nomadic project. Attia’s work presents listening as both an aesthetic method and a socially reparative practice. This mode of listening, which circulates between the artist, the interlocutors, and the viewers, echoes Frantz Fanon’s practice of social therapy. Fanon believed that healing could be achieved through collective conversations and by transforming the everyday life of an institution — its rhythms, spaces, and social relations. At the same time, the discussion highlights the fractured and uneven reception of Fanon across different geographic and cultural contexts. The lives, bodies, and practices of repair of these differently situated subjects trouble the ostensible binaries between reason and unreason, politics and psychiatry, the rural and the urban, colonial pasts and decolonial struggles. Together, the films and the accompanying conversation prompt the question: what forms and limits of knowledge about madness emerge when we listen to the collective voices of psychotherapists, psychiatrists, traditional healers, artists, storytellers, political activists, and witnesses brought together by Attia? How might this woven multiplicity of knowledges unsettle the colonial walls that continue to alienate psychic and social life? Reason’s Oxymorons (2015) 18-channel video installation Reason’s Oxymorons assembles a wide range of conversations on trauma, subjectivity, imagination, and repair. Across eighteen chapters—labelled Reason and Politics, The Magical Sciences, Modernity, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia, Ancestors and Neurosis, The Group, The Individual, and others — the interviewed actors draw on psychiatry, philosophy, ethnography, shamanic traditions, music, storytelling, and political experience. The work stages a key tension in Fanon’s clinical writings: the coloniality of the psyche and the divergent cultural understandings of trauma and repair. While regimes of repair dominant in the West often aim to correct, erase, or conceal ‘damage’, many non-Western traditions treat the scar as an active site of meaning — a visible index of past violence and a reservoir for resistance, critique, and learning. The Body’s Legacies, Pt. 2: The Postcolonial Body (2018) Video, 42 min This work examines the racialized body in contemporary France, drawing on the testimonies of cultural practitioners, journalists, and activists. It focuses on the 2017 police assault on Théo Luhaka, a young man of Congolese descent in a Paris banlieue. Through a combination of personal memories, sociological insights, and philosophical analysis, the film reveals the enduring links between colonial forms of domination and contemporary state violence. The Postcolonial Body rejects the idea that the mere ‘inclusion’ of racialized subjects within European liberal democratic systems constitutes repair. Instead, it insists on confronting the racist psychic structures that persist beneath official narratives of progress, reason, and equality.
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Taher, Saniya Cinematic Socialtherapie, from Blida to J’ai huit ans: Fanon and the Psychopolitics of the Image
Saniya Taher, ‘Cinematic Socialtherapie, from Blida to J’ai huit ans: Fanon and the Psychopolitics of the Image’, talk presented at the panel vi of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 27:25 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_18>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Henni, Samia Frantz Fanon and Psychocolonial Spaces
Samia Henni, ‘Frantz Fanon and Psychocolonial Spaces’, talk presented at the panel vi of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 28:26 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_17>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Kuster, Brigitta Un cinéma qui panse: Fanon and the cinéclub in Blida-Joinville
Brigitta Kuster, ‘Un cinéma qui panse: Fanon and the cinéclub in Blida-Joinville’, talk presented at the panel vi of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 31:05 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_16>
2026
cover imageVideo
Discussion
Discussion of panel v of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 49:00 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_15>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Jabr, Samah When the Clinic Meets the Colonial Condition: Fanon’s Legacy in Contemporary Palestinian Mental Health Practice
Samah Jabr, ‘When the Clinic Meets the Colonial Condition: Fanon’s Legacy in Contemporary Palestinian Mental Health Practice’, talk presented at the panel v of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 36:42 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_14>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
El Daccache, Sara Hermeneutics of the Symptom: A Fanonian Clinic in Palestinian Refugee Camps in Southern Lebanon
Sara El Daccache, ‘Hermeneutics of the Symptom: A Fanonian Clinic in Palestinian Refugee Camps in Southern Lebanon’, talk presented at the panel v of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 31:50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_13>
2026
cover imageVideo
Discussion
Discussion of panel iv of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 25:03 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_12>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Haslett, Tobi Fanon’s Resignation
Tobi Haslett, ‘Fanon’s Resignation’, talk presented at the panel iv of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 26:38 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_11>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Marriott, David Without Truth: Fanon’s Concept of Confession
David Marriott, ‘Without Truth: Fanon’s Concept of Confession’, talk presented at the panel iv of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 28:56 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_10>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Ventura, David Discrepant Refusals in Fanon and Glissant
David Ventura, ‘Discrepant Refusals in Fanon and Glissant’, talk presented at the panel iv of the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, ICI Berlin, 29–30 January 2026, video recording, mp4, 20:02 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260129_09>
2026
3236 resources