Utopic Performances: Reimagining the Common

The Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme is hosting the international colloquium Performances utopiques: réimaginer le commun on 18 and 19 November 2024, organised by the Critical Humanities Spaces Network (CHSN, CHCI), with the support of the CRAL (EHESS) and the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB).

Confronted with the acute crisis of the constitution of the common, from the representation of the citizen to its articulation in the social body, the reconfiguring capacities of utopic imagination will be examined from a variety of contemporary aesthetic reflexions and practices which redefine the relationships between peoples, institutions and their ecologies. Within the understanding that utopic practice, in the same gesture, projects modes of inhabiting still to be realised and critiques the underlying facticity of the present, in this convening thinkers, researchers, architects, curators and artists will examine the immanent impacts of utopic discourses and practices. This instance of collaborative work and search for a necessary language of understanding between academic disciplines and artistic practices, and the fluidity that unsettles these distinctions, at the antipodes of evasive illusion, seeks to emphasize and assume the very responsibility inscribed in the utopic as a mandate to make space for what has not taken place.

- A visit is organised at 6b in Saint-Denis on the afternoon of 19 November. -

This event is part of a series of events organised since 2022 by the Critical Humanities Spaces Network (CHSN), which operates within the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). The CHCI is a global forum that strengthens the work of humanities centres and institutes through advocacy, grant-making and inclusive collaboration. CHSN, one of six networks housed by CHCI, was founded in 2021 to fill what we see as a gap in dialogues between centre and institute directors about the critical lives our spaces are taking, and to think about places for such interdisciplinary work as aesthetic and affective spaces in which the potential for reshaping the social body is always imminent and indeed often in the making. Imbued with questions of aesthetics and politics, our conversations always return to what happens between people, ideas and environments within the structures of arts, humanities and interdisciplinary centres and spaces, and the transformative potential they hold.