Colloque/performances : “Unmapping the Renaissance”, Florence, 12-15 mars 2015

Symposium initiated and organized by Mariechen Danz (artist), Angelika Stepken (Villa Romana Florence) and Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut)

This event is a joint project of the Max Planck Research Group “Objects in the Contact Zone. The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and the Villa Romana Florence and takes place at various locations in the city.

The city of Florence is regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance. The fact that the economic and commercial power structures that developed during the Renaissance also impelled the colonization of non-European worlds – among other things through linguistic and semiotic hegemony – is to this day rarely incorporated into this Florentine narrative.

In the tourism industry and in the sciences, eurocentric categories are each in their own way persistent, even – or especially – in times of rapidly progressing globalization: even as looking outward may become more natural, it often still turns into another confirmation of the accepted master narrative.

In recent years, though, we have also seen a growing awareness of the categories, and of the perceptual processes associated with it, develop in the context of a comprehensive “transcultural turn.” Post-colonial theoretical approaches, for example, question the role of the Latin alphabet, of printing, of language or of particular social ideals on whose flip side processes of dispossession, canonization and hierarchization of culture, memory and space unfolded – and can continue to unfold in the afterlife of the Renaissance narrative.

Since the 1990s, ethnographical and anthropological representations are being critically examined and aesthetic positionings are challenged in artistic inquiries and practices through chronopolitics and techniques of distancing. Contemporary art production is global and reflects the colonization of gazes and conceits.

In this sense the symposium UNMAPPING the RENAISSANCE follows critical resurveys of the mental map of a canonical and canonizing understanding of culture and period-concept: in a dialog between science and art, whose performative practices are intended to decidedly transcend established academic formats, the event considers the connections between hegemonic sign systems, imagination and (de-)colonial practices.

PROGRAM

Thursday, 12 March
Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux – Sala Ferri
Piazza degli Strozzi, 50123 Florence

17.00
Keynote Lecture: Walter D. Mignolo
From Global Linear Thinking to the MultiPolar World Order
(The Darker Side of the Renaissance 20 years later)

Mariechen Danz
A Voiced Gesture

Friday, 13 March 
Biblioteca Laurenziana – Sala d’Elchi
Piazza San Lorenzo 9, 50123 Florence

09.30
Introduction: Eugenia Antonucci
Il Codice Fiorentino

10.00
Lecture: Medina Lasansky
Was there an Italian Renaissance? And Whose Was it?

11.30
Lecture: Maria Thereza Alves
Some considerations about European concepts of Race since the Renaissance

Piazza Signoria > Ponte Vecchio

15.00
Performance: Johannes Paul Raether
Dismembered City of Augmented Embodiments

Villa Romana
Via Senese 68, 50124 Florence

17.00
Lecture: Hannah Baader
Mapping and Un-mapping the Maritime Renaissance

19.00
Opening: The Anti-Humboldt-Box – A declaration

19.30
Performance: AFROTAK TV cyberNomads present
Adetoun Kuepper-Adebisi & Michael Kueppers-Adebisi
Der Reichstag in the reMIX– Contemporary Epistemic Literature Sound & Image Archiving | Talking in Tongues Art & Multi-Media Interventions in Times of the new Global Renaissances

Saturday, 14 March
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Casa Zuccari, Via Gino Capponi 22, 50121 Florence

10.00
Lecture: Andreas Siekmann

11.30
Lecture: Alvaro Jose Guillen Jr.

Villa Romana
Via Senese 68, 50124 Florence

15.30
Presentation: Gala Porras
Whistling and Language Transfiguration

16.00
Lecture: Adam Herring
Place in the Sun: Synaesthetic Experience in Inca Peru

18.00
The Anti-Humboldt-Box:
A guided tour by Artefakte // anti-humboldt

19.00
Screening: Liz Glynn
Hold Nothing, 2014

Sunday, 15 March
Villa Romana
Via Senese 68, 50124 Florence

11.00
Performance Lecture: Carlin Wing
Bounce, Ricochet, Rebound: Two Cases of 16th Century Ball Play

Final Meeting over Brunch

13.00
Closing Performance: Gabriel Rossell Santillán

All lectures / performances will be held in English.
Streaming on radiopapesse.org
Click on Ascolta to join the symposium live.

Contact
Eva-Maria Troelenberg
troelenberg@khi.fi.it

Further information
http://www.khi.fi.it/5097203/

Source

Image : Mariechen Danz, Methods of Inscription (Bodies Ink), 2013