Videohttps://doi.org/10.25620/e171116-1
Cite as: Sven Lütticken, ‘Trials, Tribunals, Reconstructions’, lecture presented at the symposium Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ICI Berlin, 16 November 2017, video recording, mp4, 55:07 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e171116-1>
Lecture
16 Nov 2017

Trials, Tribunals, Reconstructions

By Sven Lütticken

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.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

Organized by

organized by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini An ICI Berlin event

Video in English

Format: mp4
Length: 00:55:07
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/sven-luetticken/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Symposium

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.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

Organized by

Cristina Baldacci
Clio Nicastro
Arianna Sforzini

Related Parts

Part of the Symposium

Containing also