Watch the Keynotes
Keynote by Antoine Hennion
Taste as a collective involvement to expand the worlds that we inhabit.
Sociologists have undergone systematic investigations on what determines taste, not on what taste determines. I will rather consider tasting, sensing, valuing things as performative activities. Amateurs and what they prize form each other throughout a long process, sculpting devices and bodies, collectives and subjectivities. This helps better grasp amateurs’ experience, a demanding involvement and a doubtful course that makes the strength of things emerge and one be sensitive to them. By testing things’ capacity to respond and deploy, while offering holds by which to grab them and make them exist more, taste expands our worlds unexplored potential: aesthetics is also an ethics and a politics.
Keynote by Sophia Prinz
Challenging the Sensory Order: Artistic Practice and Forms of Perception
“This exhibition is an accusation” – these were the words Lina Bo Bardi used to introduce her 1963 Nordeste exhibition, the inaugural show at the Museu de Arte Popular (MAP) in Salvador da Bahia. Standing accused was a modernism that was forgetful of history, purely formalistic, and disregardful of the Afro-Brazilian population’s ways of everyday life. Through this example, this lecture will provide a practice theory examination of the interdependent relationship between collectively shared schemes of perception and material culture. This will both address the “form” as a mediator of sensory ordering and engage with the artistic and curatorial practices that, through aesthetic means, question the established canon of forms (and the social forms contained therein).