Art Studies
Homeless Dwelling: Devastating and Discrete Disaster.
International conference of the research program wohnen+/-ausstellen (dwelling+/-exhibiting), a collaboration between the Institute for Art History– Film Studies – Art Education at the University of Bremen and the Mariann Steegmann Institute – Art & Gender.
When we speak about dwelling (Wohnen) it is often in the doubly positive sense of existent and good: dwelling is there. It is built, it is equipped, it exists via houses, apartments, furniture. Its history is told through its existence, its materiality in scholarship and in personal memory. Dwelling appears as a positivistic given. And it is often described as positive, in the sense of good, as a protective and felicitous space of a self, of a family, status or territorial affiliation.
However, dwelling as existence and home is paralleled by homeless dwelling: destroyed dwelling, as found in armed conflicts, lost dwelling through migration, temporary dwelling in the case of homelessness and itinerancy, precarious dwelling in economic, emotional and physical deprivation, fearful dwelling in subjective crises: homeless dwelling from great cataclysms to secret and discrete horrors. Homeless dwelling incorporates the conflictual in the housed and at the same time attacks and demolishes it.
Homeless dwelling is a constant of the history and theory of dwelling. On the one hand, it is forgotten, not discussed, concealed or becomes the discourse of specialists on the social. On the other, it is also a part of dwelling that is made particularly visible, for instance, in art and theory. In the critical analysis of dwelling it becomes the counter-argument, the intentionally non-identical and unstable, the flight from a refuge experienced as disastrous. In this dissolving of the boundaries of the housed there often inheres a rhetoric of the promise of a shift into the liberated.
The conference will explore the unhoused/homeless on different levels from art and culture-historical, philosophical, ethnological, architecture-theoretical, psychiatric and artistic perspectives.
Time:
May 3 – 6, 2018
Venue:
Gästehaus der Universität Bremen
Teerhof 58
28199 Bremen
Direction and Concept:
Prof. Dr. Irene Nierhaus
Dr. Kathrin Heinz
Mariann Steegmann Institut
Kunst & Gender
www.mariann-steegmann-institut.de
Organisation and Contact:
Johanna Hartmann
johaprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de
Anna-Katharina Riedel
anna.riedelprotect me ?!msi.uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de
Mattress/ Matrice
International conference of the research field live +/- exhibit in cooperation of the Institute of Art History - Film Studies - Art Education at the University of Bremen with the Mariann Steegmann Institute. Art & Gender.
Mattress / thrown thing on which we sleep, rest, love, laze, dream, torment, reproduce, which we tarnish, under which the repressed, eerie lurking, on which we heal and die ... Matrice which shapes, duplicates, stores, reproduces, copies, produces the printed material, transmits the knowledge, leaves the odors, records ...
Mattress and matrice are media and mediators. Mattress means intimacy, everyday life and body, while matrice means publicity, knowledge and writing. Thus, the difference between authenticity, substance and representation, reproduction is (re) formulated. However, the slash between mattress / matrix marks a ratio to be discussed. Thus, the mattress, at home in the supposedly most private place, is also an agent of normalization in subjectivation processes and the biopolitical. Configured by corporealities, it is the object of the sale, on which the foundation of society takes place in its individual relation. The matrix, which is oriented towards publication as a medium of multiplication and knowledge formation, is also a metonym for embossing processes and entries in material bodies. The matrice is a theoretical figure, thinking of living in the span of substance and representation. The mattress has a double position, it is a theoretical figure and object area. Everyday life, knowledge, subjectification in body analog media of living and their pointer structures are set in relation. The intention is a transdisciplinary debate between art, architecture, visual culture and theory in the entanglement of objects, materials, aesthetic structures and contexts of meaning.
Publication:
Irene Nierhaus / Kathrin Heinz (Hg.): Matratze/Matrize. Möblierung von Subjekt und Gesellschaft. Konzepte in Kunst und Architektur. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016, Band 3, Schriftenreihe wohnen+/-ausstellen, transcript-verlag.de.
City and Culture
As part of the research focus "City and Culture" Michael Müller analyzes in his recent publication "Culture of the City. Essays for a policy of architecture "modern cultural and spatial models, aestheticization and museisation processes of urban space as well as strategies for a renewed politicization of architecture. Themes of the book are: City as a place of cultural production / street and integration / Three city models / Satisfaction sought by mere seeing / Image and space / Aesthetization, culture and economy / Museum and city / Museum and self-presentation / Avant-garde, subject and mass culture / The Dream of eternal order / criticism of links / Walter Benjamin: Architecture for the bad new / methodological change of perspective and economic cultural model.