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How does forgetting and the processes of individual and cultural amnesia shape our sense of the world and our capacity to imagine the future? Why is aesthetic intelligence and the practice of art so vital to understanding and living with memory loss?
Invisible Architectures: Lesions in the Landscape is a two day symposium exploring how interactions between art and clinical practices, critical thinking and neuroscience can transform the ways we understand memory, forgetting and amnesia.
Focusing on the idea of embodied experience across diverse individual, social, political, cultural and digital landscapes, the event brings together a range of speakers – from artists and writers to scientists, cultural theorists, historians and social psychologists.
Invisible Architectures: Lesions in the Landscape is organised by Shona Illingworth, alongside Jill Bennett as part of Lesions in the Landscape, a project exploring the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory, and the wider implications of memory loss on identity, space and imagining the future.
Sessions will focus on case studies deploying creative methods to investigate amnesia; understanding the experience of memory loss; processes and consequences of cultural erasure; haunting in computational culture; aesthetics of control in technological mediation; latency; materiality and consciousness.
Invisible Architectures: Lesions in the Landscape is supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Sound, Image Space Research Centre, School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent.
Tickets
Two Days: £25/£20 concs
One Day: £15/£12.50 concs
Lesions in the Landscape is a project by Shona Illingworth, developed in dialogue with neuropsychologists Martin A. Conway and Catherine Loveday, and Claire, who, following a trauma to her brain can no longer remember most of her past, create new memories and has prosopagnosia (face blindness). The project is supported by the Wellcome Trust.
This symposium coincides with the exhibition of Lesions in the Landscape (CGP London, 13th October – 27 November 2016) produced by FACT, Liverpool in association with CGP London, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre and UNSW Galleries, Sydney. A new publication on the project will be launched following the exhibition.
11.00-11.20 Registration
11.20-11.30 Welcome: Gareth Evans, Shona Illingworth and Jill Bennett
11.30-12.00 Shona Illingworth, Artist and Reader in Fine Art, University of Kent
Lesions in the Landscape
12.00- 12.20 Catherine Loveday, Neuropsychologist and Principal Lecturer, University of Westminster
Living with amnesia – scientific study and working with Claire.
12.20-13.00 Screening: Time Present (2016)
Shona Illingworth
13.00 -14.00 Lunch Break
Session one
14.00 – 15.30
This session will discuss methods for investigating the experiential dimensions of memory loss—from forms of aesthetic engagement and creative inquiry, to psycho-social techniques and studies in critical social psychology.
Jill Bennett, Professor and Director of the National Institute for Experimental Art at UNSW Sydney, Australia.
Lynn Froggett, Professor of Psychosocial Welfare and Director of the Psychosocial Welfare Unit, University of Lancaster
Steve Brown, Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology, University of Leicester
Steve Klee, Artist and writer, Lecturer in Fine Art, University of Kent
15.30 -15.50 Break
15.50- 16.20 First performance of Time Lapse –
A new work by composer Jan Hendrickse,
made in collaboration with poet Owen Lowery.
Simon Allen: Percussion, Sandro Mussida: Cello
Session two
16.20 – 17.10
This session explores critical perspectives on aesthetics of control and technological mediation. It challenges the phenomenon of disembodiment (drawing on critical theories of media, the body and affect) as well as regimes of visibility and remembering.
Lisa Blackman, Professor in Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College
Jaime Del Val, Meta-media artist, philosopher, performer, producer, environmental and postqueer activist, Director of Reverso Institute www.reverso.org and of Metabody Project www.metabody.eu.
17.10 -17.50 Panel discussion (Chair: Jill Bennett)
11.00-11.20 Registration
11.20-11.30 Welcome
Session three
11.30 – 13.00
This session looks at techniques for mapping cultural amnesia and agency in the contexts of cultural erasure, gender and decolonial practices.
Shona Illingworth, Artist and Reader in Fine Art, University of Kent. Mapping Amnesia, Agency and Cultural Landscape in Lesions in the Landscape
Catherine Hall, Professor and Chair Emerita of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership
Caterina Albano, Reader in Visual Culture and Science, University of the Arts London
Panel chaired by Errol Francis, Chief Executive, Cultural Co-operation (tbc)
13.00 – 14.00 Break
Session four
14.00 – 15.30
This session focuses on material landscape and consciousness, examining techniques for reading processes of engagement with the landscape’s past and its social and political present.
Lambros Malafouris, Johnson Research and Teaching Fellow in Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture, Keble College, Oxford University
Patrick Wright, Professor of Literature and Visual & Material Culture, Kings College
Baltic, Hudson and Thames: Uwe Johnson’s view from a window on Marine Parade, Sheerness.
14.50- 15.30 Screening: Lo Specchio Di Diana (1996) Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi
15.30 – 16.00 Break
Session five
16.00- 17.00
This session presents a series of films that examine the processes of cultural erasure and forgetting through reframing desire, language and intentionality, creating new latencies in order to change the shape of imagined futures.
Karen Alexander, Independent Film and Moving Image Curator
Black Atlantic Cinema Club
Luciano Zubillaga, Artist and Filmmaker
Music For a Missing Film
17.00- 17.50 Panel discussion (Chair Shona Illingworth)
