© Sebastiano Raimondo, 17_294, Lisboa 2010.
THINKING THE CITY THROUGH FRAGMENTATION AND RECONFIGURATION: AESTHETIC AND CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES
1-3 JUNE 2022, LISBON (COLÉGIO ALMADA NEGREIROS, NOVA FCSH)
IN THE FRAME OF THE FCT-FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECT [PTDC/FER-FIL/32042/2017]:
FRAGMENTATION AND RECONFIGURATION: EXPERIENCING THE CITY BETWEEN ART AND PHILOSOPHY
SUMMARY
The relationship between aesthetics, the arts, and the city has taken on new forms in the last century and a half, in a process that coincides with both the development of modern metropolises and the emergence of new technologies that have allowed us to know, study and reinvent the urban experience. At the same time, cities have always raised fundamental aesthetic questions concerning the ways of feeling, perceiving and inhabiting the spatial and temporal structures that condition the human experience, as well as the relationship with nature and the non-urban in general.
If it is true that Western philosophy emerged out of an intimate relationship with the polis, it is not always easy to make explicit the terms of the multiple historical and conceptual interactions between philosophy and the city. In any case, it seems clear that, while appealing to a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives, urban phenomena interrogate and allow themselves to be challenged and questioned by philosophical concepts: the more properly aesthetic ones, but also, and from the outset, those dealing with social, ethical, and political issues.
Fragmentation and reconfiguration: this conceptual pair is intended to guide the contributions to the conference and the way in which they propose to develop the rapport between philosophical thought and the city. The two concepts naturally communicate with other interrelated notions, such as construction and destruction, fragment and whole, the singularity of each thing and the theoretical tendency to search for a comprehensive synthesis. The main goal of this conference is the exploration of creative and dialectical tensions between fragmentation and reconfiguration that can open a critical and differential space – a space of thought and practice. In this sense, it seeks to explore the different ways in which human experience and artistic practice engage with and respond to the fragmentation that characterises modern cities. It is hoped that the conference will also be a space to help us to break open the homogenous images of contemporary cities created by processes linked to capitalism and globalisation, which time and again obfuscate other forms of life.
The concept of fragmentation does not necessarily presuppose a nostalgia for lost unity. On the contrary, it can be seen to be part of an inevitable process of modernity, which has as its productive counterpoint the analysis of fragments, details, and circumscribed case studies, a critical access to an understanding of our present time, however provisional this access may be. On the other hand, the concept of reconfiguration calls upon the very possibility of rethinking, reconstructing, and reimagining urban space, which is of the utmost importance not only for a philosophical consideration of the city, but also for the artistic practices that deal with it and are inspired by it. This is all the more relevant as the present conference (and the project that gave rise to it) are anchored in Lisbon, a city whose contemporary processes of reconfiguration raise a series of aesthetic and conceptual challenges.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
- Fabrizio Desideri (Università di Firenze)
- David Kishik (Emerson College, Boston)
- Paula Cristina Pereira (University of Porto)
- Adriana Veríssimo Serrão (University of Lisbon)
- Jean-Paul Thibaud (CNRS, CRESSON)
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
- João Pedro Cachopo (IFILNOVA/NOVA FCSH)
- Hugh Campbell (University College Dublin)
- Nélio Conceição (IFILNOVA/NOVA FCSH)
- Bruno C. Duarte (IFILNOVA/NOVA FCSH)
- Graeme Gilloch (Lancaster University)
- Sanna Lehtinen (Aalto University and University of Helsinki)
- Maria Filomena Molder (IFILNOVA/NOVA FCSH)
- Paula Cristina Pereira (University of Porto)
- José Miguel Rodrigues (University of Porto)
- Susana Ventura (IFILNOVA/NOVA FCSH)
- Susana Viegas (IFILNOVA/NOVA FCSH)
Organisation:
Paula Carvalho, Nélio Conceição, Bruno C. Duarte, Nuno Fonseca, Alexandra Dias Fortes, Maria Filomena Molder, Susana Ventura.
Location: all sessions of the conference will take place at CAN (Colégio Almada Negreiros), one of the buildings of the Campolide campus of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. This is the address:
Colégio Almada Negreiros
Universidade Nova de Lisboa,
Campus de Campolide
1099-085 Lisboa
Directions:
Entrance: Rectorate - Rua da Mesquita
Alternative entrance: NOVA Law School - Travessa Estêvão Pinto
Bus (Carris) 701, 702, 758
Metro
São Sebastião Station (Red line)
Praça de Espanha Station (Blue line)
Train (CP)
Sete Rios - Nearest station with direct connection to the blue Metro line - Praça de Espanha Station
Campolide - Connection to Carris: Bus 701, 702, 758
Bicycle (Gira is a bike rental scheme in Lisbon, which rents bikes to residents and visitors)
Gira Park - Bicycle parking on campus available.
Programme and abstracts below.
VIDEOS
DAVID KISHIK My Schizoyd City
FABRIZIO DESIDERI Cities of memory and ruins of the present. Reflections in wartime
JEAN PAUL THIBAUD Towards a Political Ecology of Urban Ambiances
ADRIANA VERÍSSIMO SERRÃO Scenes of urban life in Georg Simmel. Passages between house and city
PAULA CRISTINA PEREIRA Philosophy of the city. Rethinking the political
Closing Session Video:
NÉLIO CONCEIÇÃO Ongoing Reconfiguration: Final Remarks
MARIA FILOMENA MOLDER Closing Conference: On Some Fragments of Trás-Os-Montes (1976), a film by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro
Lecture
„Katz‘ und Maus kommen nach Haus“:
‘Those who wait’ (and wait, and wait …) in Marseilles
by Graeme Gilloch (Lancaster University)
9th December 2021 3h30pm | online event
Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89572045331?pwd=azhMT3V5blpIbTExUEQzMmZtcy84QT09
ID: 895 7204 5331
Password: B4JHVj
All welcome!
Click here for the abstract.
Inaugural Conference
Labyrinth, Ruin, Junkspace, Monad: dialectical images of the contemporary city
(Università di Firenze)
5th November 2021 4pm
Online event. All welcome!
Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85724747161?pwd=cUtmdWlLRUNVWlhVeWJ1b0pOd2Z6UT09
ID: 857 2474 7161
Password: A0K84D
CONFERENCE
TRANSLATION AND THE URBAN LANDSCAPE: THE AFTERLIFE OF THE ARCADES
December 13th 2019 | Universidade Nova de Lisboa | FCSH Colégio Almada Negreiros | Room CAN 217 
ANNOUNCEMENT:
What connects the everyday life of cities to the images of language? To what extent is it possible to reflect on the city through the lens of translation, and vice versa? At such an intersection, this issue is as ancient as it is pressing. Indeed, the manifold linguistic and cultural forms that pervade today’s cities are in many respects a lively and paradoxical re-enactment of the ancient myths of the fragmentation of language such as the Tower of Babel. This conference will explore the many faces of the act of translating within and throughout the urban landscape, taking as its starting point Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a philosophical reflection on the relationship between different historical epochs based on the history of the city of Paris.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
What connects the everyday life of cities to the forms and images of language? What is it that draws us to transpose or translate a work of art in space and in time, as when we recognize for instance the history of nineteeenth-century Paris in our present history? These and other questions can be looked at more closely by reflecting on the city through translation and on translation through the city.
In his essay “The Task of the Translator”, Walter Benjamin speaks of the transparency and the truth of translation by choosing the word, as opposed to the sentence, as the “primal element of the translator”, adding that: “if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade”.
In turn, the conception and execution of the Arcades Project are pervaded by the very gesture of translating. Indeed, the method of literary montage – the juxtaposition of quotations and images in a network of nearly infinite references and ramifications – necessarily implies the movement of translation as much as its transformation. In fact, the Arcades Project, which roughly coincides with Benjamin’s project to translate Proust in collaboration with Franz Hessel, eventually expands into a broader, essentially metaphorical idea of translation. Thus Benjamin speaks for instance of the possibility of transposing or translating “the commodity character onto the cosmos”, and says of Grandville’s “belated fantasies” that they transpose or “translate commodity’s character into the universe”. Translation thereby exceeds the literary space, and extends into the world. In the Parisian arcades – interior and exterior spaces at the same time, pathways in which objects and experiences intersect – the ambiguity of life in modern cities and metropolises is made visible: in the passerby’s movement as in the displacement of historical times, in the flow of languages and cultures as in the dynamics of tradition and modernity. They are thus immediate places of translation, understood no longer merely as the relation of one language to another, but as an art of space projected onto history by what Benjamin called the continuous life, the “afterlife” of a work.
Conference by Paulo Reyes*: "Pensar a cidade pelo projeto"
Nov. 20th 201915h00 - 18h00CAN | Room SE 2 | NOVA FCSH*Sponsored by CAPES PRINT - Edital Professor Visitante no Exterior Sênior
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (Capes) - Finance Code 001
https://www.culturelab.ifilnova.pt/en/events/conferencia-paulo-reyes-pensar-a-cidade-como-projecto
Opening conference
Nov. 28th 2018
António Guerreiro, "A gramática generativa da cidade: tipologias linguísticas, representações literárias e topografias políticas"
16h00-18h00 | Room Multiusos 2 - I&D building, 4th floor - FCSH
