Organised by Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters".

The website of the annual conference can be found here.

Please register by 30 June 2023: conference.registration@temporal-communities.de

3rd Annual Conference of the EXC 2020 "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective", Freie Universität Berlin

Arts – be they texts, books, images, films, or performances – travel through time with their materialities constantly changing. While the spatial dynamics of travelling materialities have already been conceptualized in a variety of ways, the conference will shift attention primarily to material mobilities in time: Materials move through time, they are transferred and transformed, they decay and are restored, repaired, conserved, revalued.  Even where works of art appear stable and durable in their material structure, their appearances are based on material processes into which change is inscribed. What role does the mutability of the material play in the practice of the arts? What opportunities lie in this material mutability and what unpredictability? How do material transformations effect the perception of artistic works, but also the production and experience of time? How are the relations between materials and times negotiated in theories and discourses of the arts? How does the professional stance towards materials change over time – for example from the perspective of artists, writers, performers, curators and conservators?

Based on these discussions, the conference will also provide contributions to the Cluster’s ongoing research on temporal communities. Communities need material resources, need infrastructures, and throughout history and the present the arts have provided forms and models for such material ways of community building. How do collectives and communities in the arts materialize today? How can communities sustainably and fairly manage the material resources that are indispensable for (never exclusively) their existence and for (never exclusively) their future continuity? What do the arts contribute today by, on the one hand, pointing to the indispensable material foundations of any form of sociality and communality, and, on the other hand, by critically reflecting on the pressing ethical, political, ecological, and economic problems that result from material (co)dependencies?

Programme

Wednesday, 5 July 2023

14:30 | Check-In

15:00 | Opening

Director General Achim Bonte (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin): Welcome

Directors Andrew James Johnston and Anita Traninger (EXC TC): Welcome

Karin Gludovatz and Matthias Warstat (EXC TC): Introduction

Panel 1: Genesis, Decay and Recycling

15:30 | Rebecca Schneider (Brown University): Gesture and the Jump of Flesh
Response: Torsten Jost (EXC TC)

16:30 | Coffee Break

17:00 | Hans Peter Hahn (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt): The Temporality of Things and their Obstinacy. How to Deal with the Uncontrollability of Material Change over Time
Response: Simon Godart (EXC TC)

18:00 | Anna Degler (EXC TC): The Travelling Torso
Response: Yvonne Albers (EXC TC)

19:00 | Reception

Thursday, 6 July 2023

Panel 2 Generating Time in the Arts

10:00 | Check-In

10:30 | Anita Traninger (EXC TC): Silentium! The Codex as a Time Capsule
Response: Bart Soethaert (EXC TC)

11:30 | Shannon Jackson (University of California Berkeley): Fragilities: Time and Materials in a More-Than-Human World
Response: Friederike Schäfer (EXC TC)

12:30 | Lunch Break

14:00 | Andrew James Johnston (EXC TC): Snakes and Matters: The Entangled Temporalities of Early Medieval English Heroic and Elegiac Poetry
Response: Rebecca Hardie (EXC TC)

Panel 3 Material Communities

15:00 | Sabine Nessel (EXC TC): Film Credits and Visual Prologues: Addressing the Audience Matters
Response: Till Kadritzke (EXC TC)

16:00 | Coffee Break

16:30 | Amund Ulvestad (artist, Oslo/Berlin): shifts (artwork / response)

18:00 | Bread & Wine

Friday, 7 July 2023

09:30 | Check-In

10:00 | Evelyn Schuler-Zea (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina): Knots, Stones and Living with the Dead
Response: Lindsey Drury (EXC TC)

11:00 | Coffee Break

Panel 4 Concepts of Preserving Matter

11:30 | Monika Wagner (Universität Hamburg): Consistently inconsistant: Dressing Degas' Little Dancer
Response: Marie Hartmann (EXC TC/FSGS)

12:30 | Ann Sophie Lehmann (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen): Flax in Flux: Material Biography and its Formats
Response: Nina Tolksdorf (EXC TC)

13:30 | Closing

The conference is held in collaboration with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.