Is there anything beyond trauma, and what does it look like? One of the most ubiquitous and fruitful concepts in contemporary cultural and academic discourse, trauma has been under fire as a Western-centric narrative and representational form that universalizes and decontextualizes violence, often perpetuating or conflating the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, and spectators. Have critical discourses on and artistic and activist thematizations of trauma run out of steam? Have they generated new forms of inquiry? Which alternative models have emerged in the process? The symposium proposes a transregional reassessment of the concept of trauma across a range of academic disciplines and cultural contexts. The future of this paradigm will be discussed primarily through the prism of representation, the arts, and visual culture in relation to forms of political, historical, and structural violence. The symposium explores the relation of trauma and aesthetics in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which it is being reshaped by increasing transnational displacements of people and digital flows of images and stories. At the same time, post-humanism and new materialism have challenged common conceptions of subjectivity and non-human agency, profoundly changing the understanding of traumatic ruptures affecting nature, landscapes, and animals. By implying that extreme experiences may pass down genetically across generations, the contentious field of epigenetics insists that the transmission of trauma has a bodily dimension. Last but not least, current anxieties about technology and the climate crisis seem to have generated a form of ‘pre-trauma’, channeled through narratives of global catastrophe and post-apocalypse. If there is anything beyond ‘trauma’, as these developments suggest, how should it be looked at? What new images, concepts, practices, and ways of seeing should be mobilized toward this task? Taking on the future of trauma studies as a pressing intellectual question of our time, the symposium will reflect on new forms of witnessing, representing, and possibly coping with extreme violence to emerge in the last decade, the variety of cross-cultural aesthetic responses they elicit, and their implications for rethinking the field at large.
In English
Venue:
ICI Berlin, Christinenstr. 18-19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin
14:30 Welcome by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Afonso Dias Ramos
15:00 Keynote by Andreas Maercker
Trauma Psychology: From Memory to Cultural Values and Beliefs
Introduction by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier
16:30 – 17:00 Coffee break
17:00 – 18:15 Panel I
Archives of Trauma and the Aesthetics of Witnessing
Paul Lowe
Traces of Traces: Space, Objects and the Forensic Turn in Photography
Adam Harvey
Computer Vision for Human Rights Researchers: Challenges and Opportunities
18:15 – 19:30 Coffee break
19:30 Keynote by Allen Feldman
Traumatropes of the Cacographic Body
Introduction by Arnd Wedemeyer
Venue:
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
(Panel discussions unfortunately fully booked)
9:45 Welcome by Hannah Baader
10:00 – 11:15 Panel II
Reconceptualizing Trauma
Discussion with Allen Feldman on ‘trauma aesthetics’ and its relation to ‘traumatropology’ and ‘photo-politics’
11:15 – 11:30 Coffee break
11:30 – 13:00 Panel III
Visual Constructions of Psychoanalysis and Vice-Versa
Marlon Miguel
The Brazilian Case: Psychiatric Works as ‘Inside Art’ in the Development of Modernism
Lamia Moghnieh
Beyond Trauma/Resilience: Surviving and Becoming in Today’s World
Rabiaâ Benlahbib
Visualizing Trauma: An Ethical Perspective
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 – 15:30 Panel IV – Trauma and Displacement
Stephan Milich
Reflections on Trauma, Elimination, and Empowerment in Mahmud Darwish’s Poetry and Beyond
Alice von Bieberstein
Aesthetics of Denial
Tom Snow
Migrancy and Immobility: Visual Politics and the ‘Refugee’ Crisis
15:30 – 15:45 Coffee break
15:45 – 17:00 Panel V
The Role of Cultural Organizations
Khaled Barakeh
Moving Forward
Venue:
ICI Berlin, Christinenstr. 18-19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin
19:30 Artists Talk: Futures Beyond Trauma
With Abdessamad el Montassir, Damir Arsenijević, Kasia Fudakowski, and Omer Fast
Moderated by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Afonso Dias Ramos
Venue:
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
(Panel discussions unfortunately fully booked)
10:00 – 11:30 Panel VI
Future Materialities of Trauma
Umut Yildirim
Thinking with Lungs: Notes on Genocide, Ecology, and Resistance
Zusanna Dziuban
New Materialities and Spectralities of Trauma
11:30 – 11:45 Coffee break
11:45 – 13:00 Panel VII
Thinking (the) Beyond
How to critically engage with and expand trauma studies? This panel will discuss new methodological and epistemological approaches such as new materialism, post-humanism, or the sensory turn.
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 – 15:30 Concluding Remarks
With
Khaled Barakeh
Rabiaâ Benlahbib
Alice von Bieberstein
Zuzanna Dziuban
Adam Harvey
Paul Lowe
Stephan Milich
Lamia Moghnieh
Tom Snow
et al
Keynotes by Allen Feldman, cultural anthropology (NYU Steinhardt) and Andreas Maercker, psychiatry and psychoanalysis (WIKO fellow)
Artist Talk with Omer Fast, Kasia Fudakowski, Abdessamad el Montassir, and Damir Arsenijevic
Organized by
Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Afonso Dias Ramos for Art Histories, in cooperation with ICI Berlin
Venues
Please note the different venues.
13 June 2019, 14:00 – 21:30
ICI Berlin
14 June 2019, 10:00 – 17:00
Panel discussion
(unfortunately fully booked)
Forum Transregionale Studien
Wallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin
14 June 2019, 19:30
Artist Talk
ICI Berlin
15 June 2019, 10:00 – 13:30
Panel discussion
(unfortunately fully booked)
Forum Transregionale Studien
Wallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin
The event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.
