• Mon 09 05 2016 / 7 pm •
The Fold: Diasporic Intimacies in the Postcolonial Spheres

with NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS

“To what are we tied? And by what are we seized?” The philosopher Judith Butler poses these questions in order to make her case that bodies matter; more specifically, that bodies come to matter through the performativity of normative discourse that is at once constraining and compelling. Diasporic art allows us to consider how the creation of culture is a process of both containment and boundlessness, where place matters—or comes to matter—not only in a localized or globalized way, but as an ongoing relationship between both local and global concepts of space. Diasporic artists are tied to normative frameworks of place and culture, but they are also seized to invert these by the constant interruptions of different cultural signs, exacerbated in an increasingly transnational environment. This lecture will explore the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism to consider the folding of place as a creative process, not simply representative or dialogic, and never fully of the state nor never entirely stateless. 

Venue: ACADEMYSPACE, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne
Free admission
In English