𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞-𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞-𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐲𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐮𝐦
𝐈𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐚 𝐆𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐡𝐞: "𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐬: 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐄𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭, 𝐨𝐫 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞"
𝐒𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐒𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟓, 𝐚𝐭 𝟏𝟎 𝐚𝐦 𝐏𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞
𝐌𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85816306009
The workshop will explore how estrangement techniques could be deployed in a performative practice to engage with unobservable realities, as formulated by the philosophy of scientific realism and by the speculative expeditions of science fiction. What are the instruments through which entities absent in the space one finds oneself in may be activated in a performative situation? How can an environment become unfamiliar while staying the same? When does sensation deceive and how can this deception contribute to new ways of conceptualisation?
The session will posit that estrangement, a technique which makes everyday experience appear strange, can become productive in interrogating our relationship to a reality inaccessible to the senses. With roots in Victor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie and Bertold Brecht’s effect of Verfremdung in early twentieth century avant-garde, estrangement has as its core the idea that art might betray, rather than be subservient to the senses. Mechanisms of diverting the expectations of perceptual and artistic conventions, of displacing situations, points of view or the relationship to space, of mistrust and surprise, and of transgressing the realm of the senses through imagination and hypothesis are part of the artistic vocabulary of estrangement, but also a necessary epistemological approach in the production of scientific knowledge beyond the confines of empirical validation. Seen from the perspective of their potential to estrange, art’s ties to sensibility are no longer a limiting but a productive condition in relation to the unobservable. A sensible experience which is subverted, altered and conceptually diverted is one that goes beyond common sense and produces a crisis in
what is accepted as given, thus opening up towards what Wilfrid Sellars calls a “scientific image” of the world.
Through a theoretical background and a series of practical exercises, the workshop will introduce some performative techniques for a possible subversion of the senses. While the format of an online talk brings together participants whose physical environments do not match, through the estrangement of one’s concrete surroundings new collective hypothetical spaces might emerge.
Suggested readings:
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre.” Theatre Research International 33, no.1 (2008): 84--96.
Holquist, Michael and Ilya Kliger. “Minding the Gap: Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement.” Poetics Today 26:4 (Winter 2005): 613--636.
McAllister, James W. “Thought Experiment and the Exercise of Imagination in Science.” In Thought Experiments in Philosophy, Science and the Arts, edited by Mélanie Frappier, Letitia Meynell and James Robert Brown, 11--29. New York and London: Routledge, 2013.
McMullin, Ernan. “Enlarging Imagination.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 58, no. 2 (June1996), 227--260.
Tolstoy, Leo. “Strider.” In Master and Man and Other Stories, 67--107. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Availble online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1863/kholstomer.html
About the Author:
Irina Gheorghe is a visual artist who works primarily with performance, in combination with a variety of media, from installation to drawing, photography, sound or video. Her work often addresses themes such as absence, displacement and disappearance while reflecting on the relationship between ephemeral artistic media and entities or spaces inaccessible to observation, from extraterrestrial life to hypothetical planets. Irina Gheorghe also works under the name The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, a project cofounded in 2009 with artist Alina Popa (1982-2019) with the aim of investigating how passions shape contemporary society. Her work was shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, the Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin, NCAD Gallery Dublin, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Grazer Kunstverein, Ivan Gallery Bucharest, Suprainfinit Gallery Bucharest, Project Arts Centre Dublin, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Swimming Pool Sofia, Changing Room Berlin, Zona Sztuki Aktualnej Stettin, Centre for Contemporary Art Derry, Glasgow International, TRAFO Budapest, Pratt Manhattan Gallery New York, Times Museum Guangzhou, HOME Manchester, S A V V Y Contemporary Berlin, Salonul de Proiecte Bucharest, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, BAK, Utrecht, DEPO Istanbul and Galeria Posibila Bucharest, among others. Irina Gheorghe studied painting and photography at the National University of Arts Bucharest and in 2021 she completed a PhD at GradCAM, Technological University Dublin.