"Solar Ethics"
This seminar proposes to reflect on the driving roles of artistic forms, practices and knowledge in the development and circulation of political structures, movements, ideologies and imaginations on the African continent and in its diasporas. Our work will focus on the visual and performing arts in the broadest sense of the term (dance, theatre, visual arts, photography, cinema, music, literature, digital arts...) and will be part of a critical and transdisciplinary approach. Anthropology, history, art history, political science, visual and material cultures, colonial, postcolonial, decolonial and diasporic studies of Africa... will rub shoulders and question each other. The sessions will be structured around presentations by researchers and/or practitioners - artists, cultural actors, activists. Diverse and reflecting a wide range of points of view, the work and approaches presented will have in common that working (on) the intersections between art and politics requires a commitment on the basis of which reflection and theorization are required.
Thematic of the 2018-2019 cycle: Future Africa
Future or, better still, future. The future of cities, ecologies, gender constructions; the future of technology and science; violence - political, economic, social; hope; the very notions of the future... Thinking, saying, giving substance to these and other related futures from Africa: these are the tasks that plastic artists set themselves through their practices and thoughts.ne.s, filmmakers, performers and writers, philosophers and researchers, curators and cultural activists who will be participating in the seminar in 2018-2019. Committed, indocilious, even radical, the proposals they develop undermine apriori and doxas.
Huey Copeland is Professor of Art History at Northwestern University (Evanston, USA). It is affiliated with the Theory, Gender and Sexuality Program, the Department of African-American Studies and the Department of Theory and Practice of the Arts. His research and teaching focus on the links between Blackness and the so-called "Western" visual fields in modern and contemporary art. Member of the Artforum editorial board, Copeland has published numerous articles and essays in journals ranging from American Art to Small Axe, in anthologies, in exhibition catalogues. He is the author of Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Currently, he is working on a series of editorial projects that explore the intersections between race, gender and aesthetics in the modern world.
In this lecture derived from his forthcoming volume Touched by the Mother : On Black Men and Artistic Practice, 1966-2016, art historian and critic Huey Copeland differently considers how the radical practices of the 1960s and 1970s have been remembered, travestied and reframed, by focusing on the legacy of legendary jazz musician, prophet, and composer Sun Ra within contemporary artistic practice. Engaging the work of American and European artists from Rashid Johnson to Mai-Thu Perret, Copeland’s lecture at once puts pressure on theorizations of “Afrofuturism” as well as formalist appropriations of Sun Ra’s signature aesthetic forms. Ultimately, Copeland advocates for modes of artistic engagement with the recent past that embrace the operative logic, not just the look, of Sun Ra’s philosophy, resulting in what might be called a “solar ethics” that can serve as a means of making and critique.