Rizvana Bradley

A body touched, touching, fragile, vulnerable, always changing, fleeing, ungraspable, evanescent under a caress or a blow, a body without a husk, a poor skin stretched over the cave where our shadow floats … – Jean-Luc Nancy

This conference day will focus on the haptic through the resonance of touch. Extending our critical sense of the haptic through attendant, experimental grammars of touch, we confront a set of sometimes unruly and even wild philosophical and artistic imperatives. For philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, touch marks the limits of how we come to know ourselves both in and beyond our finitude. Touch has enabled us to enrich our techniques of knowing, making possible a rediscovery of the modalities of movement, matter, and sense that comprise our subject and object worlds. Thematically, touch will recur in our discussions of artworks, and in our explorations of the irreducibly textured expressions of performance and social practice. Weaving between image, sound, and the poetic line, the conversations in this conference day will navigate the overlaps and cuts between them. The included readings, performances, and talks will explore diasporic forms of world-making, dynamic philosophies of movement, the violence of cartographic and architectural imaginaries, the material trace of touch in economies of performance, and the haptic violence manifested in history’s archival inscriptions.

Participants

Aracelis Girmay, poet
Ligia Lewis, artist
Erin Manning, Associate Professor, Studio Arts Associate Professor (Film Studies), Cinema;  Research Chair, Philosophy and Relational Art; Director, SenseLab, all Concordia University, Montreal
Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor, English Department, Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science, Nashville
Wu Tsang, artist
Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Studies, Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University College London
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, artist and writer

Program

 Block 1

10:30 AM Welcome | Jorinde Seijdel
10:45  AM Introduction: On The Haptic Resonance of Touch | Rizvana Bradley
11:00 Painting Infinitude | Lynette Yiadom-Boakye 

Block 2 

11:45 AM Break
12:00 AM The Politics of Touch | Erin Manning
12:15 AM Forensic Oceanography | Eyal Weizman (screening and skype conversation)
1:00 PM Lunch break

 Block 3

1:45 PM A Reading from The Black Maria | Aracelis Girmay
2:15 PM We hold where study | Wu Tsang (screening and live conversation) 

Block 4

3:00 PM Break  
3:15 PM Ligia Lewis in conversation with Erin Manning en Rizvana Bradley about ‘minor matter’ by Ligia Lewis
4:15 PM To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch | Hortense Spillers
5:00 PM End of program