Seminar Cycle: Experiencing the city between art and philosophy

March 2019 | April-June 2020

This cycle of seminars has as its main purpose to think about the role of artistic practices in representing and reconfiguring the urban experience. A group of artists and researchers will join the team of the project, "Fragmentation and reconfiguration: Experiencing the city between art and philosophy". Cinema, photography, literature, sound art, architecture: how do they reflect and reinvent the city? What do they make us feel? And what are their social and political roles? Lisbon will be the starting point, but other cities will be part of the journey.

Calendar

Cinema: March 3 2019

Fotografia: April 13 2020

Artes Sonoras: May 3 2020

Literatura: May 24 2020

Arquitectura: June 16 2020

All sessions online (videos below in Portuguese) except for the one dedicated to Cinema, which took place at Colégio Almada Negreiros (CAN) (map)

+ INFO here (programme and bios in Portuguese)

Project Seminar

“Special Edition”

24 June | 15h00*

*Session in Portuguese

+ info (programme in Portuguese) here

Seminar Cycle: Conceptual Figures of Fragmentation and Reconfiguration

January - June 2019June 27: Ruin and Metamorphosis

Maria Filomena Molder (IFILNOVA), “Ruins. Approaches.”

Maurizio Gribaudi (EHESS-CRH), “Paris 1789-1857 – the metamorphoses of a city.”

15h00-18h00 | Sala 1.05 - I&D Building, first floor - FCSH

Abstracts:

• Maria Filomena Molder

  1. Ruins and the disclosure of a secret.

  1.1. What is the secret of forged ruins?

  1.2. What is the secret of the ruins of Wittgenstein's house in Skjolden in Norway?

  2. Piranesi’s Pianta di Roma. Pezzi without matrix. "Rome buried in its ruins" (Quevedo) eternal and labile, fleeting.

  2.1. Goethe and the task of reconstituting the image of that of which one can not have but a ruined idea: Italian Journey.

  3. Ruins and allegory

  3.1 Ruines. Ma famille, Baudelaire, poem «Les petites vieilles» of Les fleurs du mal. Allegory and compassion.

  3.2. The historical method in Benjamin. Dialectical image, ruins (rags and residues), apokatastasis and montage:

  3.2.1. "The destructive character": Apollo versus the angel of history.

  3.3. Ruins as an image of the city in The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares / Fernando Pessoa and in Agustina’s Um Bicho da Terra.

  4. Ruins and melancholy. The Thalia Theatre in Lisbon. Form, function and metamorphosis.

• Maurizio Gribaudi

  When introducing his great work on urban history in 1927, the great historian Marcel Poëte wrote that the evolution of a city is indelibly marked by the forms it seizes since its inception: The land of its first settlement, but also the constructed space, with its routes and its most important monuments.

  This observation, both objective and commonplace, has often been read as an invitation to think of a total continuity in the evolution of urban landscapes. As in the case of the butterfly’s caterpillar and chrysalis, the initial forms of a city would already hold in them, as a sort of inscription, those of its future paths, in a kind of genetically programmed metamorphosis.

  Now, if we look carefully at the evolution of a city, we will realize that the dimension of continuity is given only by the different ways of resuming and correcting the countless ruptures that beckon its development. Hence, it is primarily at this level that we can find the continuity and the identity of a city. The nature of the tensions that cross it, the scars and the deeper wounds it carries, are also the traits that individualize it and define it as unique and different in each moment of its becoming.

  From this viewpoint, urban development mainly strikes us as the continuous and never foreseeable engendering of ever new forms, an uninterrupted sequence of metamorphoses that change both the nature of physical space and the physiognomy and perspectives of its inhabitants.

  Bearing in mind the evolution of Paris from the Revolution to the Second Empire, I will try to show the action of these mechanisms. In order to do so, I will be focusing my attention on the conflicts and on the numerous ruptures of this particularly crucial period.

June 6: Panoramic presentation and Montage

Alexandra Dias Fortes (IFILNOVA), “Panoramic presentation: Conceptual and methodological aspects of a synopsis (of urban life)”

Susana Nascimento Duarte (IFILNOVA), “City, extended montage, constellation.”

15h00-18h00 | Sala 1.05 - I&D Building, first floor - FCSH

Abstracts:

• Alexandra Dias Fortes

  The idea of a panoramic presentation (übersichtliche Darstellung) is of fundamental importance; it denotes, on the one hand, clear vision – for example, of a landscape, a language game or a city – and, on the other hand, a concept that arises from an analogical movement, which compares and brings together words, images and fragments, rounding them up or reconfiguring them by way of intermediate links in a meaningful whole.

  For this reason, and given its active and dynamic character, delimiting it and fixing it conceptually proves to be a difficult task to carry out – this does not mean, however, that we can not trace aspects of its physiognomy and discover its internal logic. How do we make panoramic presentations? The plural is more convenient and adequate than the singular: It is an exercise that knows no end, reproduced – many times – in moments of understanding, in synopses of what we observe, of our ways of acting and talking. Still, its complexity and dilation must not lead to confusion or to the ruin of perception. Thus, the need to bring to light its methodological aspects – one of my aims – that allow us to see what surrounds us more clearly, and to be fair and just to the facts when we describe them. Wittgenstein thinks of a panoramic presentation as vital, and his remarks – inspired by Spengler, and especially by Goethe – are crucial in aiding us to grasp its intellectual and perceptive value qua exercise. I will start from Wittgenstein’s observations, and then I will try to show how this concept can illuminate and reveal the experience of the city. Aldo Rossi will allow us to enter the latter.

• Susana Nascimento Duarte

  In the Passagenwerk(Das Passagen-Werk, Volume 5 of the Gesammelte Schriften), an unfinished project for which he collected a mass of notes, quotations, Denkbilder, bibliographical and photographic references, Walter Benjamin recommends a method suitable for reflecting upon and producing a historical lexicon about the capitalist origins of modernity, viz. the montage of concrete and factual images of the urban experience connected with it. Benjamin manipulates these facts as if they were charged with revolutionary energy, capable of being transmitted, transversally, for several generations. What is montage in this extent? An operation that allows another readability of history, which becomes the object of textual and imagistic constructions provided by quotations drawn from their original contexts, and carried over to the immediate present, with the power to awaken political consciousness among contemporary readers; if montage is visible immediately and literally in the Parisian arcades, which are at the centre of the project, in the kaleidoscopic way of juxtaposing advertisements and signs of stores, in the fortuitous arrangement of objects and goods in shop windows, it also has been raised by technology, and above all by cinema and throughout the twentieth century, to a conscious principle of construction. It is not by chance that Benjamin sees in cinema the means par excellencefor composing a 'chronicle' of the modern city. In fact, beyond the strictest dimension and technique of montage, the true invention of cinema is montage as a concept, inseparable from the question of time and its problematization; the extended montage, which approaches distant and heterogeneous realities, adapts cinema for understanding the circulation between different historical times sought by Benjamin, for the proposal of updating the past in the present, as an essential movement that defines the historical phenomenon as constellation. Starting from cinema, what is the meaning of a view of the city through the principle of montage, similar to what Benjamin did for nineteenth century Paris?

May 14: Aesthetic Experience and Fragment

Nuno Fonseca (IFILNOVA), “An attempt at clarifying a philosophical place: Aesthetic experience (in the city).”

Bruno. C. Duarte (IFILNOVA), “Fragment: Image and concept.”

15h00-18h00 | Sala 1.05 - I&D Building, first floor - FCSH

Abstracts:

• Nuno Fonseca

  The notion of aesthetic experience tries to account for an important part of the human experience, and although it embraces an immense and multifaceted variety whose complexity and vagueness has challenged its definition (to the extent that some suggest its conceptual futility), still, it remains central and determining for a whole philosophical discipline: Aesthetics – not to be confused with Philosophy of Art, although it frequently intersects it. The case of the city – which is not so much an object as it is a multiform and fragmented field of possible aesthetic experiences – will be taken under consideration in order to try and clarify, or at least contribute in clarifying the meaning and scope of this topic or philosophical place.

• Bruno C. Duarte

  When does a concept come to an end? Maybe at the moment it becomes an image. After many variations on the 'art' or 'aesthetics' of the fragment, the latter seems to have reached a state of exhaustion, or at least an impasse. In many respects, it ceased to be a universal, a figure of theory, and returned to beingonly a fragment, that is to say, a visible and tangible part of some thing like a whole which, for all intents and purposes, remains unknown as such. As a fragment, it has become a concept that only is a concept just because we recognize it immediately (and literally) as an image. It is only starting from the mismatch of these two perceptions – one theoretical or discursive, the other sensitive or physical – that it is still possible to think of what we call a 'fragment'. To do this, I will try to look closely at some of the celebrated works that, by way of very different reasons, have become fragments: Georg Büchner's Woyzeck– Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls– Fritz Lang's Metropolis– Erich von Stroheim's Greed.

April 11: Cosmopolitism and Catastrophe

Bartholomew Ryan (IFILNOVA), "Chaosmopolitism in James Joyce: City, Ruins, Betrayal, Nomadism, Body."

Gianfranco Ferraro (IFILNOVA), "Catastrophe and reconstruction: utopias, dystopias and reconfigurations of the urbis form."

15h00-18h00 | Sala 1.05 - I&D Building, first floor - FCSH

Abstracts:

• Bartholomew Ryan

  James Joyce coined the word 'chaosmos', which incorporates the collided and kaleidoscopic vision ('collideorscape') of fragmentation and reconfiguration in the artist's work. We will travel through cities, ruins, betrayals, nomadic life, and the "epic of the human body" toward a perspective and art of life that I call Chaosmopolitanism.

• Gianfranco Ferraro

  When catastrophe strikes, a way of life, and to a greater extent, an urban way of life, stands bare. Throughout history, the urban catastrophe has been a crucial moment for reconsidering the relationship between nature and human construction. At the same time, the outbreak of catastrophe in urban history inaugurated the possibility of new forms of life, as well as the conception of utopias and dystopias through which the life and the form of the city are reconfigured. By means of some examples of "natural" catastrophes (Lisbon, Messina, Gibellina) and "human" ones, this presentation will try to address how philosophy, as a way of life and as a practice of reconfiguration, has historically crossed and continues to cross an emptied "place", either by catastrophes or by the contemporary changes of urban life, making it a new living topos.

February 20: Archive and Atlas

João Duarte (IHA-FCSH), “Entropy and prosopopoeia in ordering the archive.”

Nélio Conceição (IFILNOVA), “The dialectical tensions of the atlas.”

15h00-18h00 | Sala 1.05 - I&D Building, first floor - FCSH

Abstracts:

• João Oliveira Duarte

  We will start from three images so as to enquire a set of contemporary artistic practices where the archive is in question. The first image is Wolfgang Ernst’s: The archive that presumes or implies a "hallucinatory prosopopoeia," a tension or irregular distribution between the voice of the living and the voice that comes from elsewhere. The second image comes from a well-known story of Simonides of Ceos: At dinner, the guests got buried under the ceiling of the room, and Simonides, who had left the room shortly before, was able to identify all of them from where they were seated, placing memory in a tension between the order of provenance and that of destruction. The third and last image lies in the proximity of the first, and emphasizes above all the work of distance, time and technique. In the latter, the archive would resemble a shell from which, at a distance, a sound that looks like the sea can be heard.

• Nélio Conceição

  In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin refers to a kind of "productive disorder", supposed to be the canon both of involuntary memory and of the collector. Can the same canon be applied to the conceptual figure of the atlas? And if the answer is yes, what specific traits will it assume in this case? By closely following – though with a few detours – Didi-Huberman's work "Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science", and starting forthwith with the realization that the atlas is a visual form of knowing that implies two paradigms, the aesthetic of the visual and the epistemic of knowledge, I will explore the figure of the atlas as an organization of images and space of thought where fragmentation and reconfiguration emerge as fully operative notions. Some dialectical oppositions will guide the way as well as the departures from it: Childhood and adulthood; divination and study; nature and history; ragman and photographer. In dealing with the organization of space(s), their connections and tensions, the atlas figure can also be used heuristically to see and think of cities – places to which we have an ever circumscribed and fragmented access.

January 27: Collection and Memory

Maria João Gamito (FBAUL), “Collection: frames, boxes, views and clouds”

Claudio Rozzoni (IFILNOVA), “Photographs as fragments of memory? Photos, belief, fantasy.”

15h00-18h00 | Room 2 - I&D Building, fourth floor - FCSH

Abstracts:

• Maria João Gamito

  Taking as reference four literary texts – A Cabinet D’Amateurby Georges Perec, Die Neue Melusineby Goethe, Deux originauxby E.T.A. Hoffmann, and El coleccionista de nubesby Mauricio Montiel Figueiras – I will discuss the sedentary vocation of collecting, associated with a centre and a centripetal impulse, a name and its assimilation, a stable territoriality and its representation, as opposed to the nomadic vocation of contemporary metropolises, in their turn associated with a decentralization and a centrifugal impulse, anonymity and its multiplication, and with an unstable territoriality and its appearance.

  The world in a painting, the world in a box, the world as a picture-frame, as well as what belongs with the world that escapes a picture, are here understood as circumstances of a culture of curiosity that both figure it – miniaturizing it in the finite logic of the collection – and enlarge it, reconfiguring it in the fleeting images of the eccentric crowds moving around, images that transport places with them into other places, each time making them the impermanent landscape of an origin.

• Claudio Rozzoni

  Since Aristotle, philosophical tradition has questioned the relation between memory and ‘what was’. The images of memory, fragments of our past, ‘bring back’, manifest what is no longer, what can no longer be perceived, according to a peculiar form of presence / absence. This same – paradoxical – presence is the one evoked by images of fantasy (Phantasia) capable of offering a proteiform manifestation of unreal fragments.

  Moreover, shared, public images increasingly became a part of our life, and are fragments we use frequently to recreate what was and give unity and meaning to our experiences. How do memory and fantasy characterize our relationship to these physical images? And among these, do photographs have a privileged relationship with our past, thus constituting "pure fragments" for the reconstruction of our stories?