Organized by the the Research Groups AGI (Art, Globalization, Interculturality) and AASD (Art, Architecture and Digital Society) from the University of Barcelona (UB), the Research Group Mediaccions from the  Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Arts Santa Mònica.  27th, 28th, and 29th October, 2016 at the Department of Art History (UB). c/ Montalegre 6-8. 08001 Barcelona

Thinking about art from the prism of speculation may involve the creation of alternative futures. Introducing doubt, babbling, the “what ifs”, counter-memory against the ideal need of a primal origin (or source of meaning where we recognise each other) and being open to discontinuity, chance and materiality in history means asking ourselves if it is possible to both make and think about art in different ways. If it is possible to envision another history from other horizons of meaning, not so much to pursuit its truth but to question the meaning and the value embedded in the stories of our truths. This conference thus proposes to speculate about futures as contemporary fables producing truth effects imbued with ethical and political significance.

Speculations over futures within the arts seek to contradict traditional modes of conceiving art history by means of meanings that stimulate thinking rather than generating new truths with which we align ourselves. Fables or stories that make people think, like toolboxes, upon which history is being “fictionalized” from a political reality that makes it true, just the same way politics which does not yet exist are being “fictionalized” from a historical reality.

We seek to explore not only one but multiple senses, not one but multiple and diverse art histories, ignored or omitted, including artists, materials, technologies or excluded geopolitical zones of repeated and commonly accepted stories. Such histories of art are to be investigated and revealed from a cosmopolitical scope that is aimed at building a common space where no one can claim the right to choose the central point of view from which a subject must be addressed. A space of coexistence of the otherness without the need of articulating consensus: a space of coexistence in the divergence that accounts for our constitutive heterogeneity.

This conference aims at assembling differences in semantic-materials skeins of all those agents involved in the art world, whether they are visible or invisible to be revealed, human or non-human, objects, materials, speeches, technologies or relational infrastructures that build and are in turn built as specific forms of governance. Precisely these art infrastructures, inherited from the Enlightenment, promised modernity, development and progress, but their lives have been shown to be made of fragile relationships between people, things, and institutions that try to govern them. Today its very fragility allows us to approach these infrastructures through maintenance and repair in order to shed light on actors, places and moments that have been overlooked or silenced by their stories.

This conference will examine alternative art histories that are committed to the material turn while moving forward, hand in hand, with methodological-theoretical perspectives such as media archaeology, new materialism, speculative realism or actor-network theory and social studies of science and technology exploring the world of the arts by means of speculation. Approaches that have already placed their focus on relationships, dismantling modern maxims that keep nature, society and technology confined.

DAY 1. THURSDAY, 27th OCTOBER.
Venue: CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

8:30 – 9:30
Registration

9:30 – 10:00
Conference opening
Conference chairs: Anna Maria Guasch (UB), Lourdes Cirlot (UB), Pau Alsina (UOC)

10:00 – 11:00
Keynote
Alpesh Kantilal Patel. Writing transnational art histories: cruising and entanglement
Florida International University
Chair: Christian Alonso

11:00 – 11:30
Discussion

11:30 – 12:00
Coffee break

12:00 – 14:00
SESSION A: Cosmopolitism
Chair: Christian Alonso

14:00 – 16:00
Lunch

16:00 – 17:30
Keynote
Flavia Costa. Technological forms of life
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Chair: Daniel López del Rincón

17:30 – 18:00
Discussion

18:00 – 20:30
SESSION B: Historias divergentes
Chair: Daniel López del Rincón

Venue: CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

10:00 – 11:30
Keynote Ursula Biemann
The Cosmopolitical Forest
Artist, Zurich
Chair: Anna Maria Guasch

11:30 – 12:00
Coffee break

12:00 – 14:00
Round table

14:00 – 16:00
Lunch

16:00 – 18:00
SESSION C.1: Artist Talk: Time, Space, Matter
Chairs: Víctor Ramírez Tur, Ana R. Granell, Vanina Hofman

18:00 – 18:30
Coffee break

18:30 – 20:30
SESSION C.2: Artist Talk: Time, Space, Matter
Chairs: Víctor Ramírez Tur, Ana R. Granell, Vanina Hofman

Venue: ASM: Arts Santa Mònica

10:00 – 11:30
Keynote
The Cracks of the Contemporary
Rick Dolphijn
Utrecht University
Chair: Pau Alsina

11:30 – 12:00
Coffee break

12:00 – 14:00
SESSION D: New Materialisms and Infrastructures
Chair: Pau Alsina