Mediterranean Corpo-graphies – Politics of Borders and Poetics of Touch
Dienstag, 6. Dezember 2016, 18 Uhr
Goethe-Universität, Campus Westend, IG Farben-Haus, Raum 1.411
To politically and historically conceptualize the Mediterranean in the present conjuncture is very much a crucial exercise in establishing new coordinates and bearings. Its ‘unsafe’ borders, its tragic load of desperation and death, its part in the construction of the global interconnected contemporaneity, call for our attendance, as scholars, students and cultural agents, to the region and the discourse of the Mediterranean. This is why it is important to extend the conversation to the cultural figurations that are at work today in and around this Sea, inside the political and poetical forms of resistance that let counter-narrative emerge.
Trespassing into the Mediterranean complex cartography, I would like to propose some configurations of performance practices and poetics, with the aim of offering a personal response to different aspects surrounding the material/symbolic construction of ‘borders’, and the transcendence of such borders in individual, cultural, political and territorial con-tacts which come into view in the contemporary Mediterranean performance zone.
The performative experimentations carried out by some artists who move, write and dance, inside and outside the aesthetical and political borders of the Mediterranean map, highlight the bodily tension of their languages and their compositional desire of re-mapping and re-imagining new corporeal geographies. They propose and disseminate alternative sensorial and identitarian modes of inhabiting the Euro-Mediterranean space through a new culture of ‘touch’.