24—27.01.2023 Share 2023 | Semaine Intensive
Discrete Agentivities - Toxicity and porous bodies
Toxic substances often act in an imperceptible way: frequently odorless, invisible, silent, they deploy their action in networks of beings and things, and make the contours between bodies blur. If toxicity poisons, it transforms above all the bodies in which it is deployed. Bodies that act in a world altered by the effects of large-scale industrial production, aiming at maximizing profits to the detriment of multiple cohabitations. Altered lives" that are, according to researcher Michelle Murphy, already "co-constituted by material entanglements, with water, chemicals, soil, atmospheres, microbes and built environments, [...], and already recompiled, painful and damaged", but also open to a continuous becoming.
The conference discusses these discrete agentivities through artworks and museum collections.
As part of ARBA Brussels, Share Week:
"Im-material life"
This year, as a follow-up to previous editions, Share Week articulates the proposal on lines of thought between materials and the material world. If materiality, it seems, has become the sole dominance of human subjectivity, can the properties of materials provide norms to overcome the ambiguity of materiality? While knowing that things also gather people/material relations. Can we understand materiality and material properties as two states in motion, in constant transformation of the relations of a process of acquisition, definition and creation? In this material world, what part is given to the imaginary? To the fictional? To the mental? How the work of the artist is situated and transforms with his own research, this ambiguous relation between the living matters and the material world? Between the imaginary and the constraint of materials? The real and the unreal? In an undeniable way these questions touch the figure and the image of the artist.
Program: