Talking Phantoms is a public symposium on Hauntology in the contemporary arts. It will take place on September 14th, 2023, at The Grey Space in the Middle, in The Hague, during the opening of the exhibition re-Membering Phantoms.
Through the evening, guests, speakers, and participating artists will be invited to collective reflect on the questions:
19:10-19:20
Introduction to re-Membering Phantoms
de-Haunted Collective
Lore Pilzecker is a visual artist in her Ma Fine Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. The artist researches the deconstruction of monumental artworks by means of reproduction. At the exhibition of re-Membering Phantoms, artist Lore Pilzecker reflects on the idea of mortality. How does one remember the deceased? When someone dies and loses their physical body, all that is left is are stories. One becomes a myth. Lore tries to reflect on the story-like characteristics of the deceased and creates her own symbolic universe surrounding the death of a loved one.
Mariana Gusso Nickel is an artistic researcher, editor at Simulacrum Magazine, and member of the de-Haunted Collective. She has recently graduated from the Master of Art and Performance Research Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently writing, writing, and writing about the Anthropophagic Movement in Brazil, making (it) work with her teeth aligners, and co-organising the exhibition re-Membering Phantoms with Lore Pilzecker.
Talking Phantoms:
the Symposium
What kinds of re-Membering processes allow us to relate to the phantoms of traditionally unacknowledged voices, memories, and (hi)stories in the arts?
How can contemporary approaches to Artistic Research benefit from the field of Hauntology?
Talking Phantoms aims to open a conversation between presenters and visiting visual artists, designers, and other researchers about different approaches to Hauntology and its relevance for the creation of contemporary Artistic Research.
By facilitating an exchange of ideas between academic researchers and artists, Talking Phantoms will contribute to the creation of transdisciplinary research methodologies that blur the distinction between academic and artistic forms of knowledge production.
the
Programme
19:20-19:30
The Breath of the Giant
Marieke Peeters
A patterned sofa chair holds a figure enclosed in its folds. The vibrant red pattern of the chair is eerily reminiscent of flesh and scarred tissue. Sinking ever deeper into the chair an elusive presence creates a meditative but unsettling atmosphere when all you can hear is their breath. A durational performance that resembles a symbiosis of the human figure and object. Haunting is assigned another meaning here as the haunted object becomes something extremely physical. A ghost that is evocative of another type of physicality.
Marieke Peeters is a visual artist based in Den Haag, NL. She creates immersive installations, sculptures and films that combine intensive material research with performance. In her artistic practice she creates a form of expanded cinema that reconsiders the tableaux vivant. She facilitates immersive experiences that attempt to find comfort within the horrific. Informed by horror as a genre and construct, her works navigate an unstable social reality.
19:40-20:10
The Future Belongs to the Ghosts
Petrică Mogoș
Over the last three decades of increased precarity and insecurity, the act of remodelling the future has disappeared in the turbulent transformations that took the reins over Eastern Europe. The very notion of imagining a better future has been relegated into a worn-out ideal, widely regarded as a by-product of privilege (who has time to think about the future in the age of semiocapitalism, when ideology has pervasively leaked into all forms of existence?), or cancelled entirely from the collective imagination. Juxtaposed between utopia and absurdity, even the possibility of fantasising about what is the come has been discarded and nullified. In the context of disintegrating dreams and prospects, the failure of traditional liberal ideology, the rise of extremist movements, the danger of profound environmental crises, as well as the dilemma of the nation-state system as a relic of the past, what does the future entail for us?
Petrică Mogoș is a Romanian writer, researcher, and founder of various editorial projects. Among these, he is the co-editor of Kajet, a Bucharest-based journal that proposes an internationalist exploration of Eastern Europe, and co-editor of The Future of, a quarterly magazine that seeks to deconstruct, recontextualise, and recuperate contemporary ideas as valuable tools for a more liveable, more just future.
14 September ‘23 19:00-21:00
The Grey Space in the Middle
the Programme:
19:10-19:20
Introduction to re-Membering Phantoms - de-Haunted Collective
19:20-19:30
The Breath of the Giant - Marieke Peeters
19:40-20:10
The Future Belongs to the Ghosts - Petrică Mogoș
20:20-20:50
A Eulogy for the Lost and the Living - Anouk van Wijk
20:20-20:50
A Eulogy for the Lost and the Living
Anouk van Wijk
Visual artist Anouk van Wijk will present a performance lecture, building onto her ongoing project A Eulogy for the Lost and the Living. The project entails a journey of revisiting old practices, an exploration of material kinship, and an immersion in microbial worlds; entering the world of another, of many others.
The research project on microbial entanglements and the accidental death of the microbes she worked with resulted in an altar of sorts; a place of remembrance and celebration. Through different media she explores what it means to allow disintegration as an accepted outcome of her work. Does making kin also include letting go, allowing death and decay to happen?
In this 45-minutes talk, Anouk van Wijk will invite the audience to explore this complex microbial kinship, disclosing how the practice of zooming in unravels unfamiliar terrains across a range of different scales. This will be done through readings and visual footage, combined with a sharing of methods and outcomes regarding the artistic research process.
Anouk van Wijk is an artistic researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work explores other-than-human relations through tactile matters, charming critters, and the grotesque. Finding resonance in continuously transforming bodies, she builds intricate sculptural assemblages that teeter on the edge of attraction and repulsion.