Not this time. Temporalities of ending, editing, and enduring

The conference Not this time. Temporalities of ending, editing, enduring calls for perspectives on retrieving and renegotiating temporal aspects of artistic practices, lived lives, and knowledge production while at the same time resisting ‘overing’ what we still seem to be in the very midst of today.

Temporalities are not times; like continually broken clocks, they must be reset again and again. They are expected to recalibrate and fit into a larger temporal order. Temporalities do not experience a uniform time but rather a time particular to the labour that produces them. Their experience of time depends on where they are positioned within a larger economy of temporal worth.

Keynotes

The Waiting Times Project, Kelechi Anucha, Lisa Baraitser, Stephanie Davies, Michael Flexer, Martin Moore, Jordan Osserman & Laura Salisbury (University of Exeter & Birkbeck)

Annett Busch, writer, editor, translator, and co-curator of Women on Aeroplanes (Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, NTNU)

Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Yale University)

Jane Jin Kaisen, Artist, professor (The Royal Danish Academy of Art, School of Media Art, Copenhagen)

If speed theory had its heyday around the end of the previous millennium, announcing that everything goes faster and faster not least due to technological growth, the beginning of the 21st Century reintroduced us to temporalities of resistance such as slowing down, resting, maintaining, waiting, repairing, and ending. As such, analyses of historically and geographically different power chronographies – examining diverging interests and power structures within concepts of time – have become imperative. Scholars across the aesthetics, cultural studies, and social sciences have unfolded historically specific temporalities tied to either global asymmetries and unequal distributions of work and rest, to the syncopation of ecological extinction and technological optimism, or to the afterlife of colonialism and the persistence to continue living.

Instead of supporting temporalities of growth, development, and exhaustion, how can we produce and analyze temporalities of maintenance, endurance, and redistribution? In the arts, we notice an increasing interest in the aesthetics of production and fieldwork – both as an anthropological method and in the sense of working across fields. With this call, we look to concrete practices and material approaches. The film editor, for instance, works with rhythm, composition, and the relation of space and time, as a mode of thinking not about but with images, sound, locations, people, and so on. In performance art, queer witches and Black choreographers instigate the copresence of lost ancestral commonalities. Across literature and visual arts, science fiction makes us reflect on the uneven distribution of futures.

Not this time marks a refusal. The act of rejecting or reimagining historical conceptions of time often leads to the carving out of alternative temporal practices informed by queer, feminist, intersectional, critical race, decolonial, postcolonial, or indigenous positions. These temporal strategies state a demand to “work on their clock”, as they complicate and challenge dominant Western “time maps” and their disciplining of time. Whether rooted within or outside the academy such practises also encompass what we refer to as temporalities of ending, editing and enduring. How may we rework time ontologically, epistemologically, methodologically, analytically, or even affectively? What comes after the ending? Who is afforded the power of editing and at what cost? How can we, others, and other constitutions of weendure alone or together across time?

Register for the conference

 

 

Download programme (pdf)

Practicalities

The price of the conference will be € 70 + an additional conference dinner. Emerging scholars and independent artists/cultural workers presenting papers can apply for support for travel and accommodation (flat rate of € 250).

Conference organizers

The conference is organized by the New Carlsberg Foundation research centre Art as Forum, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

The conference is supported by CEMES (Center for Modern European Studies), University of Copenhagen.

Read more about the centre and announcement of the keynote speakers

Eva la Cour, Postdoc, eva.lacour@hum.ku.dk

Anna Meera Gaonkar, Postdoc, amg@hum.ku.dk

Xenia Brown Pallesen, PhD-scholar, xbp@hum.ku.dk

Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, Assistant Professor, c.u.schmidt@hum.ku.dk

Frederik Tygstrup, Professor and Director, frederik@hum.ku.dk

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the organizers.