IDSVA will participate in Biennale Sessions in June 2019

On the occasion of the Biennale Arte 2019, La Biennale di Venezia addresses Institutes of Higher Learning, Research Centers, Universities, Academies of Fine or Applied Arts with a special project. This summer, IDSVA will participate in Biennale Sessions with a lecture/seminar given by artist-philosopher Giovanni Tusa on the topic of New Ecologies. A lexicon for the XXI century. The lecture will take place on June 18, 2019, in the seminar room Sale d’Armi at the Arsenale venue, located on the ground floor, from 10.30 am to 12.30 pm, and will be open to the public.

The lecture/seminar will introduce the student to the latest and more urgent themes in continental philosophy, critical theory and contemporary art theory in the XXI century while also giving the student an overview of more classical issues of critical humanities and philosophy of arts. The Greek term oikes refers both to the “house” and to the “environmental” (eco-logy). By taken up the polysemic etymology of the term, the seminar will discuss the violent deconstruction, re-shaping and profanation of urban spaces and what we are used to describe as “nature”.

The seminar departures from the hypothetical difference between two concepts of the catastrophe in relation to ecology: one being Goethe’s definition of the Lisbon earthquake from 1755 as an “extraordinary world-event” [außerordentliches Weltereignis]; and the other driving towards an argumentation that we witness since the “atomic age” a continuous sequence of economical, enviromental, social catastrophes that eventually goes beyond the human possibility of any “reordering”.

The seminar proposes several readings and screenings that however revolve around comparable issues: a thinking beyond the dichotomies of nature and culture, the question of technology, the future of praxis. But the seminar will also discuss humanist theories of ecology, which have traditionally concentrated upon the importance of preserving nature for the sake of humanity. Recent posthumanist theories of the environment, by contrast, emphasise the need of placing “nature” in a decentered position, in a new relationship with a “posthuman” world. After the culture of the “end”, after the cult of catastrophe, and after the two events-limit called “Hiroshima” and “Auschwitz”, the seminar proposes readings and screenings that rethink a world that, after many “ends”, still remains.

Organized by the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA)

In the context of Biennale Sessions

Special Programme for Higher Education Institutions

at La Biennale di Venezia’s 58th International Art Exhibition