Stages of Globalisation: Spectacles of Society around 1800 and Today

Keywords: images, media, theatre, transnational, history

This research project is focused on the central question to which extent specific relationships of the visible and the audible (image and word) in theatrical representations create orders of looking that perform transnational imaginations. It examines the aesthetics of theatre as a 'Leitmedium' in late 18th-century Europe and the image-politics after 9/11, focusing on the relationship between theatre and new media under the conditions of the so-called globalisation. This leap into the 21st century is introduced by the hypothesis that the early 19th century as well as the early 21st century are confronted with a 'spectacular impulse' concomitant to social, media-technological and epistemological historical breaks.

Partner: Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS)

Running Time:  2012-August 2013

ATLAS: Performing TransATLAantic Knowledge S/treams

Keywords: knowledge, transnational, education, pictorial, globalisation

This project aims to create a common virtual platform to share diverse forms of knowledge that will forward tools for a Dramaturgy of Difference in Globalised Universal Teaching. The point of departure is to combine practices of literacy and performativity (embodiment) with pictorial knowledge to overcome epistemological and geographical hierarchies. It is organised along the lines and logics of the 'Atlas,' reflecting on different reformulations and reorganisations of the concept as it was in first instance envisioned by Aby Warburg. Main reference points for the rework on the atlas are George Didi-Huberman’s Atlas: How to carry the world on one’s back? and Walid Raad’s ongoing project on The Atlas Group.

Partners: University of São Paulo and Institute of Theatre and Performance Studies

Running Time: Ongoing

Poetologies of Artistic Practices in the Global Sphere           

Keywords: arts, public sphere, politics, aesthetics, agency 

This project focuses on increasing simultaneous cultural processes of homogenisation and heterogenisation of human co-existence in a global sphere. It questions the artistic strategies that are directed to and performed in a global public space, by looking for new poetological claims. This means to analyse dynamical spatio-temporal configurations and conditions of 'stages of globalisation' to understand the specific relations between action (agency) and perception (spectatorship) as a new challenge for artistic practices (e.g. urban interventions).

Partner:  This project is affiliated with the project on Emotional Democracy initiated by Josef Früchtl (University of Amsterdam)

Running Time: Ongoing