12.6.17

12th International Conference on the Arts in Society and the Arts in Society Research Network



 2017 Special Focus: Gestures That Matter 

14 - 16 June 2017
The American University of Paris with Pantheon Sorbonne University, Institute ACTE (Arts Créations Théories Esthétiques), CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research), France


                                                                                                                         Image by The Arts in Society


 About

 Founded in 2000, the Arts in Society Research Network offers an interdisciplinary forum for discussion of the role of the arts in society. It is a place for critical engagement, examination and experimentation, developing ideas that connect the arts to their contexts in the world – on stage, in studios and theaters, in classrooms, in museums and galleries, 
on the streets and in communities.


Gestures That Matter 


Making a gesture involves confronting the unknowable. A gesture is not simply mechanical like a movement, nor is it fully semantic as a sign might be, nor fundamentally intentional like an action must be. The idea of a “gesture” escapes the classical categories of meaning and is never developed as an independent notion. A trait that often characterizes gesture is its ability to use the body as a means to draw evanescent traces. Because a gesture inadvertently creates relation, 
a “milieu” institutes itself within the interstices of being and metamorphoses our quotidian lives. The gesture is often a tool towards the transformation of the self and of the world. André Leroi-Gourhan writes that “the tool is only real in 
the gesture which renders it operative and only exists within a cycle of operativity.” 

Intrinsically inter-corporeal and inter-subjective, the gesture is a “means without end,” in the words of Giorgio Agamben. The gesture is always a form of the intermedial. But when the gesture apprehends its mediality in an honest and noble manner, it becomes an artwork. That is when a gesture “matters.” Whether it emerges in a ritualistic, artistic or technical context, the gesture extends and transmits itself well beyond the duration of its concrete manifestation for both the doer (the actor) or the one doing the observing (the spectator). It is right there that the body draws a simple gesture and aims to show the most rudimentary form, but also the most essential, of that which we call “art.” The gesture shows a clear materiality insofar as it does not disappear as it seems, and it leaves permanent changes in the art world and in within society. That is when gestures “matter,” insofar as they both are important for giving a deep meaning to our lives and inscribe durable transformation in the flux of everyday event. Gestures matter because they are ethically, politically and aesthetically important. Gestures matter because they do not evaporate but shape our lives on the long term.

Barbara Formis
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The Equality project by Roberta Orlando will take part in the Twelfth International Conference on the Arts in Society, 
as part of the Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts.


Find out the full program here.




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