»Biographies & the Production of Space - Between Life and Places«

Geographies are intense zones of human action and interaction – from market places to migration, and homes to cyber communities. Spaces are not simply containers within which people live and work; spaces are a product of human lives and the actions that take place in those spaces. Exploring the relationship between the physical armature of a place and the larger sphere of political and cultural action and production is something that this theme proposes to engage with. In this exploration, we propose to engage with biographies – the vectored lives of people and things. Biographies are complex journeys of individuals within multiple lives and spaces. The biography is proposed as a means to exploring the culture of spaces and the sciences of its production.

Biographies could be »channels of communication by means of which subjectivity and facticity engage in a constant nervous process of dialogue.«[1]

Places and geographies are active zones of politics and cultural processes and it is in the attempt to understand the complexity of what makes a place that we propose to work with the lives of people and objects that are part of these places – their structure, their composition, their occupation, and their journeys. What is the relationship between life and places, politics and spaces in the everyday lives of people and their societies, their objects and their stories?

The symposium consists of lectures, discussions, readings and performances, as well as keynote lectures by Nancy Adajania, cultural theorist and independent curator, Bombay/India and by Ackbar Abbas, professor of comparative literature at University of California, Irvine, CA/USA. Other speakers are Gal Kirn, political philosopher and editor, Berlin/Germany, Ljubljana/Slovenia and Ute Meta Bauer, founding director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Singapore/Republic of Singapore.

[1] Gertrud Koch: »Foreword,« in: Siegfried Kracauer: Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time. New York 2002, pp. 12-13.