World Ends Day
An Online One-Day Conference on Ends
9 July 2021, Zoom
World Ends Day is a one-day online conference on constellations of durational ends—biological as much as political, embodied and yet intangible, capitalist and also planetary. We have to conceptualize the state of living in a continuous or consecutive aftermath. Ending, however, is also our hope as it seems to guide us to a radical potentiality of the not-yet: a telos that liberates us from being in a state of perpetual parenthesis; an ever flowing means without ends and endless ends.
On 9 July, Ends (Felipe Cervera, Kyoko Iwaki, Eero Laine, and Kristof van Baarle) will host a double bill of roundtables on the topic of ends by bringing together thinkers, artists, and practitioners from multiple cultural provenances reflecting on various threads of ends. Each session will invite three key speakers, who will first provide a short 15 to 20 minutes provocation on ends based on their recent works and research. The various topics will cover the global pandemic, environmental catastrophe, disaster and racial capitalism, vegetal and animal cosmopolitics, ghostly necropolitics, disaster patriarchy, climate of fear, posthuman cybernetics, and speculative futurities.
After each provocation by the speakers from their own scholarships and perspectives, we will open the roundtable to a larger conversation with online participants.
Registration is required and happens via facebook or the PSi Constellate Webpage. To register, you have to become a PSi member, which this year only costs 5 euro - a kind support for the organization in dire times.
The detailed schedule is as follows:
World Ends Day Part Ⅰ
Time: 5am (California) / 8am (New York ) / 1pm (UK) / 2pm (EU) / 5:30pm (India) / 8pm (Singapore)
Steve Dixon (LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore)
Amanda Piña (Artist and Cultural Worker, Mexico-Chile-Austria, Amsterdam University of the Arts, the Netherlands)
Eva Horn (University of Vienna, Austria)
World Ends Day Part Ⅱ
Time: 8 am (California) / 11am (New York) / 4pm (UK) / 5pm (EU) / 8:30pm (India) / 11pm(Singapore)
Rustom Bharucha (Writer and Dramaturg, India)
Zarina Muhammad (LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore)
Shankar Venkateswaran (Theatre director, India)
The event is supported by the University of Antwerp's Research Centre for Visual Poetics and LASALLE College for the Arts, in collaboration with Performance Studies international as part of PSi Constellate.
Bios:
Steve Dixon is President of LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, one of Asia's leading arts institutions. His latest book, Cybernetic Existentialism Freedom, Systems and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance (Routledge 2020), reanimates and fuses the ideas of existentialist philosophy with the systems sciences of cybernetics to present an illuminating methodology to critique contemporary arts. He is also the author of Digital Performance (MIT Press 2007), co-founder and Advisory Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Routledge).
Eva Horn, professor of Modern German Literature and Cultural Theory, Dept. of German, University of Vienna. She is the author of The Future as Catastrophe. Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age (Columbia UP 2018), and, with H. Bergthaller, The Anthropocene. Key Issues for the Humanities (Routledge 2019). She is the founder and director of the Vienna Anthropocene Network
https://anthropocene.univie.ac.at.
Amanda Piña is a Mexican-Chilean-Austrian artist and cultural worker living between Vienna and Mexico City. Her work is concerned with the decolonisation of art, focusing on the political and social power of movement. Her works are contemporary rituals for temporary dismantling the ideological separations between modern and traditional, the human, the animal and the vegetal, nature and culture. She currently works on the realisation of the long-term project Endangered Human Movements dedicated to movements and cultural practices that have already vanished or are threatened with extinction. Amanda is a research fellow at Amsterdam University of the Arts.
Rustom Bharucha is the author of several books, including Theatre and the World, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Terror and Performance, and the recently published Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, co-edited with Paula Richman. Last year, during the first phase of the pandemic, he produced a 9-episode video-lecture on Theatre and the Coronavirus, which is available on https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-http://berlin.de/.../interweav.../online-projects/index.html
Sankar Venkateswaran, is a theatre director from India. He lives and works from Sahyande Theatre, a theatre-dwelling he built in the mountain valley of Attappadi, Kerala. His works include Criminal Tribes Act, Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, Shogo Ohta’s Water Station, and INDIKA for Munich Volkstheater. He served as the artistic director for International Theatre Festival of Kerala in 2016 and 2017. He is a recipient of Ibsen Scholarship, Norway in 2013.
Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound and moving image, she is interested in the broader contexts of myth-making, haunted historiographies and role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends polyphonic voices to data-driven systems and shapeshifting worlds. Her work has been presented at Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), NTU Centreof Contemporary Art (Singapore), Indonesia Contemporary Art Network (Indonesia), and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (Taiwan,) among other notable venues in Asia Pacific and Europe.