From the scenic essay to the essay-exhibition

Expanding the essay form in the arts beyond literature and film. International conference from April 27th - April 29th 2022

Theme of the conference

More than 400 years after the publication of Michel De Montaigne’s leading Essais, the enduring afterlife of the essay form attests how this ‘heretical form’ (Adorno) not only continues to challenge the literary conventions but also transgresses the borders of the literary field to venture into other artistic disciplines. The genre of the essay film is the most prominent example of this dissemination but the expansion has set out in other fields as well. Art historian W.J.T. Mitchell introduced the notion of the ‘photographic essay’ and theatre scholar Hans Thies-Lehmann coined the ‘scenic essay’ as one of the constitutive elements of postdramatic theatre. In addition, the work of contemporary artists such as Ralph Lemon, Hito Steyerl, Thomas Bellinck, DECORATELIER and Oliver Zahn attest to a commitment to the essay form. More recently, the essay form has entered the curatorial field and the practice of exhibition-making as the ‘essay-exhibition’.

Engaging with this emerging prominence, the conference welcomes scholars and art practitioners to present their academic and/or artistic engagements with the essay form. Unlike the realm of literature and film, the essay form in the field of performing arts, visual arts and curatorial practices has received only modest attention. The goal of this three-day conference is to continue the mapping the essay form in these disciplines. By doing so, the conference aims to enrich the existing vocabulary of theatre and performance studies and aspires to resolve the hiatus between the existing theories on the essay. The conference’s emphasis on the essay form beyond the field of literature and film by no means that scholars or artists operating in these fields are not welcome. On the contrary, by assembling a wide variety of contemporary perspectives on the essay form this conference aspires to create a productive dialogue between more established fields of study on the essay and the new articulations presented during this gathering.

Keynote Speakers

Lauren Gabrielle Fournier

Lauren Gabrielle Fournier is a writer, artist-curator, and scholar whose work coheres around visual culture, philosophy, and multi-genre/hybrid genre writing. She completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto (2021), and received her PhD in English Literature from York University (2019). Her Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (The MIT Press, 2021) is the first book-length study of “autotheory.” Her novella The Barista Boys is forthcoming through Fiction Advocate in San Francisco (2022). She has organized major exhibitions and screenings of contemporary art and film, and recently co-edited an issue of ASAP/Journal with Dr. Alex Brostoff on autotheory and decoloniality.

Ho Rui An

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, he probes into the ways by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. He has presented projects at the Asian Art Biennial (2019), Gwangju Biennale (2018), Jakarta Biennale (2017), Sharjah Biennial (2017), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2018), Haus de Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center, Manila (2017), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017) and Para Site, Hong Kong (2015). In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

Thijs Lijster

Thijs Lijster is assistant professor of philosophy of art and culture at the department of Arts, Culture and Media studies of the University of Groningen. In 2012 he received his PhD in philosophy (cum laude) at the University of Groningen, for a dissertation on Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s concepts of art criticism. He contributed to books such as Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (eds. De Boer and Sonderegger), Institutional Attitudes and No Culture, No Europe (ed. Gielen) and was coeditor of De Nieuwe Duitse Filosofie (The New German Philosophy, 2013), De Kunst van Kritiek (The Art of Critique, 2015), and Spaces for Criticism. Shifts in Contemporary Art Discourses (2015). In 2017 he published Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism. Critique of Art (AUP).

Ogutu Muraya

Ogutu Muraya is a writer and theatre maker whose work is embedded in the practice of orature. He studied International Relations at USIU Africa and graduated in 2016 with a Master in Arts at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam. His performative works and storytelling (Fractured Memory, On Thin Ice, and Because I always feel like running) have featured in theatres and festivals across different countries. Muraya's artistic practice is a dialogue between literature as the written word and orature as the spoken word. This dialogue is an essayistic reflex at the core of which is the desire to narrate complexity and led to a search for new forms of storytelling.

Program

The full program of the conference with an overview of the thematic panels.

From the scenic essay to the essay-exhibition is an in-person conference. It is not possible to attend the conference online or via a livestream.

Registrations

Early bird rate (01/03/2022 until 1/04/2022)

100€ registration fee for participants with institutional support

60€ registration fee for participants without institutional support

Regular rate (01/04/2022 until 26/04/2022)

120€ registration fee for participants with institutional support

100€ registration fee for participants without institutional support

Registration fee includes:

- Access to all the keynote lectures and presentations

- Coffee and tea during the morning and afternoon breaks

- A daily lunch prepared by KASK café.

- Drinks at the closing reception on Friday evening (29/04/2022)

Please click here to register online.

Location

The conference takes place at KASK & Conservatorium - School of Arts Ghent, Louis Pasteurlaan, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.

KASK & Conservatorium is located on the Ghent's historical Bijlokesite. The Bijloke site is on a walking distance from the historical centre of Ghent. To get to there by public transport, take Tram 2 or 4 and exit at ‘Bijlokehof’ or Tram 1 and exit at ‘Verlorenkost’. Click here for time tables, rates and more information on public transport in Ghent

How to get in Ghent?

By train:

The railroad station Ghent Sint-Pieters is well connected to Bruxelles-Midi/Zuid, Europe’s main hub for international high-speed trains. Thalys, Eurostar, TGV Brussels-France, ICE and Intercity serve Bruxelles-Midi-Zuid. Every twenty minutes there are direct trains between Ghent Sint-Pieters and Bruxelles-Midi/Zuid. Book online bookings and find more information on SNCB International.

By plane:

Brussels Airport (Zaventem)

Every 30min there is a direct train from Brussels-Airport to Ghent Sint-Pieters (54 min). It is also possible to take a train to Bruxelles-Midi/Zuid and transfer to a direct train to Ghent Sint-Pieters. The train station is located directly under the departures and arrivals halls, at level -1. Click here for more information about traveling from/to the Airport.

Brussels South (Charelori)
This airport in the South of Brussels serves low-cost airlines. Your airport is only 20 minutes from Charleroi Sud station. Once there, it is possible to take a direct bus (line A) to the airport. A "combined" train + bus ticket is available on the SNCB website. Visit the SNCB website, as well as the TEC website to find out about rates and schedules.

Accommodation

On the city of Ghent’s official website visit.gent.be there is an exhaustive list of hotels, B&B’s, hostels and holiday homes. The following hotels are on a walking distance from the conference’ venue and the city center of Ghent.

ibis Gent Centrum Opera Hotel
Nederkouter 24, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Phone: +3292250707
Email: H1455@ACCOR.COM

B&b Hotel Ghent Centre
Voldersstraat 17 , 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Phone: +32 93 96 61 30
Email: gent.centrum@hotelbb.com

Hotel Onderbergen
onderbergen 69, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Phone: +32 9 223 62 00
Email: info@hotelonderbergen.be

Hotel Monasterium PoortAckere
Oude Houtlei 56, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Phone: +32 9 269 22 10
Email: info@monasterium.be

Yalo Boutique Hotel
Brabantdam 33, 9000 Ghent. Belgium
Phone: +32 (0) 9 395 92 00
Email: hello@yalohotel.com

COVID-19

Please find here the website of the Foreign Affairs-department of the federal government in Belgium for all questions related to the corona-measures applicable to arrival in Belgium and questions related to enter Belgian territory.

For an overview of the corona-related measures at Ghent university click here. On this page you will find all the current information about the impact of the coronavirus at Ghent University.

Call For Papers

The twenty-first century seems to be the century of the essay. Almost 400 years after the publication of Michel De Montaigne’s Essais, the continuing afterlife of the essay form attests how this ‘heretical’ form (Adorno 1984 [1958]: 171) not only continues to challenge the literary conventions but also transgresses the borders of the literary field. The introduction of the notion of the ‘film essay’ by Dadaist filmmaker Hans Richter in 1940 marked the beginning of the essay form as a travelling concept in other artistic disciplines. The features of the essay form were apt to explore and to apprehend the cinematic practices of filmmakers like Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Jonas Mekas, Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl (amongst many others). The (re)new(ed) interest from the 1990’s onwards resulted in a substantial body of theoretical work on the essay film within the field of film studies (Arthur 2003; Alter 2007, 2018; Alter & Corrigan 2017; Biemann 2003; Corrigan 2011; Hollweg & Krstić 2019; Rascaroli 2009, 2017).

In her seminal text from 2007, Translating the Essay into Film and Installation, Nora M. Alter pointed out how ‘the nature of the essay encourages and promotes its translation not only into different languages but also into other media and forms’ (55). Additional to this observation, W. J. T. Mitchell’s definition of the ‘photographic essay’ (1995) and a more recent body of work on the photographic essay illustrates how the essay form provided a productive framework to approach the work of photographers like Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange or the collective photographic projects of John Berger and Jean Mohr (Graf 2013; Klingensmith 2016). This conference takes Alter’s observation as a starting point and as an invitation to trace, to map and to explore the essay form and essayistic practices beyond the field of literature, film, or photography.

This conference has a particular, but not an exclusive, interest in how the essay form, once leaving its written or audiovisual format, appears and is manifested in the field of performing arts, visual arts and curatorial practices. In his canonical book Postdramatic Theatre (2000), German theatre scholar Hans Thies-Lehmann coined in a concise way the ‘scenic essay’ as one of the elements that shaped the panorama of postdramatic theatre. Accompanied by theoretical and philosophical texts on stage, Lehmann’s ‘scenic essay’ referred to how the means of theatre were used ‘to think aloud’ about the actors’ subject, its mode of representation and the role of language (113). In contrast to many other ideas and insights that appeared in Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann’s rather brief expository on the ‘scenic essay’ was not picked up in the field of theatre and performance studies. A rather remarkably observation when one, as noted earlier, explores the history of the essay, its evolution and how it disseminated in the field of cinema and photography. Especially when we observe a rather explicit engagement with the essay form in the theatrical, performative, and curatorial practices of artists coining work as ‘audio-essay’, ‘theatrical essay’, ‘performance essay’, ‘choreographic essay‘, ‘performative essay’, ‘essay-exhibition’. The temporal and theoretical gap between Lehmann’s observations and these recent developments coerces to explore new grounds and to expand the theoretical frameworks to capture this tendency.

The extensive collection of theoretical work on the essay in literature and film proves how the attribution of the label ‘essay’ or ‘essayistic’ to an artwork does not necessarily mean an artist designates the work or its artistic practice as such. Some artists are explicitly engaged with the form, others are not. This observation prompts to welcome contributions on artworks and artistic practices that comply with the hallmarks of the essay but do not label it as such. By its preference for a dialogue of ideas, the observational, the display of a process of thinking, a high degree of subjectivity and (self-)reflexivity, speculation and ambivalence, the essay form could resonate with a wide array of artworks and artistic practices. The history and the dissemination of the essay attests how these attributes assisted the essay as a key agent in challenging conventional modes of expression, representation, and knowledge production. By welcoming artists, art practitioners, curators and theorists operating outside the academic realm, the conference aims to host a productive and enriching dialogue between those explicitly committed to the essay form and those (unintentionally) engaging with the essay’s hallmarks. Within this context, we welcome submissions that address the essay form from a multifaceted understanding as emergent in theatre, dance, performance, visual arts, and curatorial practices. These submissions include but are by no means limited to:

The essay form within the field of theatre, performance, and dance
The essay form within documentary theatre
The essay form as a dramaturgical tool or method
The essay form and performativity/the performative dimension of the essay
The staging of essays
The essay form and scenography
The essay form or the essayistic as a curatorial mode or curatorial practice
The essay-exhibition
Essayistic spectatorship
The essay form and installation art
The lecture performance as essayistic practice
Audio-essays
Essayistic storytelling
The essayist as first-person narrator on stage
The essay form in exilic, diasporic, or transnational contexts
The essay form in the Anthropocene
The essay form within autoethnography or autotheory

We accept:

Individual paper-presentation (15/20-minute presentation)
Thematic panels (max. 3 presentations of 15/20 minutes)
Other presentation formats: performances, workshops, …

All proposals (max. 350 words, including a short biographical note of 100 words) should be addressed to Jasper.Delbecke@Ugent.be. If an official invitation is required earlier for research funding purposes, please contact the convenor to ensure that you submit your abstract as early as possible.

Important dates:

Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2021

Notification of acceptance: 15 November 2021

Date of the conference: 27 – 29 April 2022.

Organization

Institutional partners:

Ghent University (Faculty of Arts and Philosophy: Department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies, Department of Literary Studies and Department of Architecture and Urban Planning)

KASK & Conservatorium - School of Arts Ghent

University of Antwerp (Faculty of Arts: Department of Literature)

KU Leuven (Faculty of Arts: Research Unit Literary Theory and Cultural Studies and Research Unit Art History – The Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture)

Practical Organization:

Research Centre S:PAM – Studies in Performing arts and Media (Ghent University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies)

Organizing Committee:

Wouter Davidts (Ghent University)

Jasper Delbecke (Ghent University)

Laura Herman (KASK & Conservatorium - School of Arts)

Kyoko Iwaki (University of Antwerp)

Steven Jacobs (University of Antwerp)

Anneleen Masschelein (KU Leuven)

Alexander Roose (Ghent University)

Christel Stalpaert (Ghent University)

Bram Van Oostveldt (Ghent University)

Hilde Van Gelder (KU Leuven)

Scientific Committee

Maude Bass-Krueger (Ghent University)