22nd International Congress of Aesthetics / Belo Horizonte

By choosing the topic “Contemporary Aesthetics: Dialogues through Art, Culture and Media” as its main theme, the organizing committee of the 22nd International Congress of Aesthetics (ICA 22) aims at the increasing and deepening of the discussion by today’s practitioners of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, about the modes, through which this field of knowledge could contribute to enhance peaceful and fruitful contacts among the most different people and cultures of the world. Facing to it, the central goal of ICA22 is to promote ways to understand and share the experiences of how aestheticians, philosophers, artists, art, culture and media theorists, media entrepreneurs, architects, designers, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities, social sciences and arts think the relations between art, culture and media in a way of problematizing norms and processes of naturalizing human phenomena in the very notion of culture.

As a matter of fact, the nowadays quite common insertion of artistic and aesthetic research and practices in the media presupposes a critical posture towards social and political constructions involving concepts of identity and difference. Consequently, they bring to the center of the debate on culture and media not only the traditional subject matters of philosophical aesthetics, but marginalized forms of representation and experience of sexuality and gender, class, race / ethnicity and territory, technology and so forth, including the countless activities of daily life.

This is the reason why among the topics related to the main theme of congress include new media, design, aesthetics of the body and of the sports, as well as the different ways in which aesthetics is carried on nowadays in Continental Europe,  Anglo-American field, Asia, Africa and Latin-America.

Since the whole world today is menaced by anti-democratic and anti-humanistic political forces — and retaking Friedrich Schiller’s inspiration concerning an aesthetic education of humankind —, the concept of the congress also includes the possibility of debates about activistic practices concerning cultural matters, the potential aesthetics to help the rebuilding of democratic convictions, the prevention of barbarism and to foster social and politic pluralism.

All this points also to the recent discussions on “decolonial aesthetics”, and since in 2022 the centenary of the “Modern Art Week” — an event that marked the entering of Brazilian culture in realm of contemporary artistic expressions — is going to be commemorated, Oswald de Andrade’s conception of  cultural “anthropophagy”, understood as a result of  the mentioned event, is going to be discussed and celebrated as well.