Arts and Science profs presenting in NYC
A trio of Arts and Science faculty members are representing Nipissing at the Double Dialogues Why Do Things Break? Workshop at New York City’s National Opera Center, April 20-22. Dr. Pavlina Radia, associate dean of the faculty of arts and science, and Dr. Paul Monaghan, assistant professor of classical studies, present their performance installation, It’s Raining Soot: An Unsettled Odyssey. The installation explores the role of memory in the haunting of historical events like colonization, WWII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Memory as rupture and rapture becomes an unsettled odyssey of culture, nurture, and affect whose broken topographies are both one and many.
Dr. Eric Weichel’s presentation, Resurrection(s): Trauma, Tea, and Teleology examines Ai Wei Wei’s politically subversive act of breaking. In this experimental presentation, Dr. Weichel juxtaposes video art showing the breakage of domestic ceramics, many associated with social rituals of tea, comfort, or domesticity, with the reading of a series of texts: poems culled from Tang or Heian anthologies, or passages from a series of theoretical writings.
Double Dialogues is a refereed journal dealing with the discourse and practice of the arts, encompassing the visual arts, film, multimedia, dance, music, creative writing and theatre.
They are asking workshop participants, whatever their research or disciplinary background, to consider why do things break, fall apart, fall down, disintegrate, splinter, corrode, degenerate, devolve?
- Think: break out, break into, break up, break around, break from, break down.
- Think: families, relationships, institutions, communities, buildings, walls and boundaries
- Think: ideological contexts – political, economic, religious, ethical, intellectual, social, sexual, artistic movements or revolutions
This roundtable workshop meeting is limited to participants who contribute to the theme from their individual disciplinary or research perspective or from a small invited group of participants familiar with one another wishing to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the theme.