Teaching period: 27th – 31st March, 2023
Location: MALMÖ ART ACADEMY, Sweden
Teacher(s): Marie Muracciole
ECTS: 3
Number of available places for KUNO students: 2
Level: BA /MA
Course description:
In Woman Sleeping (1981) Liz Magor interprets one famous sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse (1910). Stating that women have been, for so long, artists “put at sleep” and struggling to wake up, Magor’s photomontage associates the passivity of Brancusi's beautiful head to a space for elaborating a practice, a studio – as when she says that being slow is a method, a different pace for thinking, moving and producing, and incidentally, a way to deal with the brutality of the art market.
This seminar will take “sleep” as a ground to explore art practice through the way it is linked to different kinds of awakening and to the possibility of developing multiple nuances of attention, as well as the part played by the body, the soma, in the artist's experiments and projects. Alternation and porosities between sleep and awakening are discretely shaping our lives. Stating that art embodies and renews awareness, we will explore the working process and ask ourselves what is at work in the studio that we are.
Biological rhythms of activity and rest have a social and political history. Indeed, both the duration and structure of sleep have been governed by a succession of norms. Jonathan Crary's book, 24/7 Capitalism and Sleep, details the political stakes attached to this supposedly unexploitable moment. Roger Ekirch, by researching segmented sleep in preindustrial societies, has excavated long term politics of sleep and the invention of insomnia - initiating what is now called Sleep Studies. Modernity wants the body to be “recycled” overnight. The contemporary world cultivates and exploits the ideology of sleep disorders. Meanwhile, the most dispossessed among us, in metropolises the world over, sleep outside.
Falling asleep stays a resistance –to the principles of blind exploitation that ruled the planet, to permanent solicitations of commercialized exchanges -, an escape - to socialization and its orders, to the brutality of the real, and sometimes a luxury.
Art settles sometimes some reactivation of sleep, some hallucinatory experience, by imbedding the viewer’s body into montages of sound, visual mirages and their woven narratives, like in the cinema projection theater and the black cube today. We’ll question experimental practices addressing more directly to a somatic regime that stresses our proximity with the other living organisms on the planet. Moreover, they bring what anthropology today is stressing by contesting the opposition between nature and humans, and denying the human specie the ownership of the planet, as in the approaches opened by Viveiros de Castro or Philippe Descola. The daily cycle of rest is our intimate winter, when we are most in phase with our planet rhythms and of other species, as well as with the unknown that we contain. In this contradiction stay perhaps some forces.
Application deadline: 3rd of March, 2023
How to apply: Please send an e-mail with a short motivation to Maj Hasager at maj.hasager@khm.lu.se
Financial Support by KUNO:
Travel support between countries: 330 € (except 660 € to/from Iceland)
Subsistence per week: 250 € per week.
In case of any questions please contact Charlotta Österberg at charlotta.osterberg@khm.lu.se
