On Wednesday, October 3, we will offer two seminars:
At 10.15-12.00, Berndt Clavier, Senior Lecturer in English Studies, will hold a lecture with the title Strindberg and Technological Framing.
At 15.15-17.00, landscape architects and artists Fabio Ciaravella and Mimì Coviello will lead a seminar titled Let’s talk about Shame. Malmö Dialogues on Architecture and Shame.
Both seminars will take place in the K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.
Below you will find abstracts for the two talks.
Berndt Clavier: Strindberg and Technological Framing
In an article from 1994, Ulf Olsson, complains about the state of Strindberg research. According to Olsson, there is surprisingly little work done on Strindberg in the Nordic countries. The work that is done is often fearful and wary—usually focusing on very small details and “unable” (Olsson’s word) to give any account of larger aesthetic formations in Strindberg’s oeuvre. The few forays that have the ambition to explain more are often biographically oriented, focusing on what Olsson calls “Strindberg’s material,” the stuff from which scholars assume that his aesthetic energies grew and which usually boils down to catalogues of the books Strindberg collected in his library or might have read while travelling. In order to find new and more comprehensive work, Olsson argues that we need to look outside the Nordic countries, particularly to the United States where the same theoretical limitations do not seem to apply (but where other limitations apply, such as a basic unfamiliarity with the Swedish language and cultural history). Recently, I have been part of a US-based initiative to understand Strindberg as a “site” of impulses and energies, rather than as an author bound by genres or biography (or cultural history, for that matter). So far, this work has generated one study published by Bloomsbury, August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre (2018). In the research seminar, I would like to begin my presentation talking about my contribution (co-authored with Tim Engström) to that work, but end somewhere else, in the relationship between technology, subjectivity and the aesthetic. I will begin in a few concrete individual works (By the Open Sea, The Ghost Sonata, some Wunderkamera photographs, and one of Strindberg’s attempt at natural science, Antibarbarus), and end up in aesthetic philosophy and how the construction of subjectivity is understood to relate to the individual work of art. This theoretical space, I argue, allows me to understand Strindberg apart for the constraining history of his reception in Sweden.
Fabio Ciaravella and Mimì Coviello: Let’s talk about Shame. Malmö Dialogues on Architecture and Shame
Matera is a Southern Italian city that was elected to be the European Capital of Culture for 2019 partly because of her relationship between shame and architecture. What we are trying to do is to build a form of European identity through a collective psychoanalytic session on Architecture. Shame will be used both as a tool to reevaluate parts of European culture that have not yet had considerable attention, as well as a filter through which to recognize mistakes that perpetrate through the forms of the space. During the seminar, the AoS group will expose the structure and the method of the research as well as the outputs that will be presented in Matera (2019).
The participants will be asked to contribute on the debate about possible relationships between architecture and shame and, together, we will finally open the Malmö dialogues on Architecture and Shame, starting from the interventions of the participants. Malmö will be one of the European check-points for an international dialogue on the relationship between architecture and shame and the final results of these dialogues will be presented in Matera in 2019. These dialogues will be part of a wider process that is actually involving the whole Europe.
Fabio Ciaravella
Architect and artist, art in public space and new relationships between art and architecture.
PhD in Architecture and Urban Phenomenology (Università della Basilicata,IT), one of the founders of the art collective Studio ++. He was Fellow at the MIT Art, Culture and Technology program in Boston and he is part of LabSo, unit of Urban Sociology of Università di Firenze (IT) where he is actually teaching “Social Innovation and Public Art” at the Postgraduate Master Program “Futuro Vegetale”. He is the coordinator of the project “Architecture of Shame” for Matera 2019 European Capital Culture.
Mimì Coviello
Landscape architect and baroque singer, urban regeneration and smart cities
PhD in Architecture and Urban Phenomenology (Università della Basilicata,Italy), previously fellow at Peking University (Beijing,China) and at VWA Landscape Lab (Vevey, Switzerland), founder of C-FARA professional collective in Matera, Italy. She collaborates and has collaborated with several Italian universities and international research centers (Versailles Ecole de Paysage, Swiss National Science Foundation, Università di Roma Tre, EPFL Lausanne), teaching as well as developing research projects based on a prototyping approach (www.agrinetural.it). Mimi is an active landscape architect, partner of a young practice based in Matera, meson ro studio. She is a team member of the project “Architecture of Shame”.