IMPACT23 - Ecologies of Attention
08 - 12 November 2023
The annual transdisciplinary symposium IMPACT invites practitioners and theorists from the arts and sciences to engage with changing, overarching, and complex themes, linking their diverse perspectives and formulating common concerns.
›IMPACT23‹ explores the interrelationships between humans, animals, plants, and objects – in ecosystems and in the technosphere – and how these shape our patterns of perception through assumptions, projection, and selection. ›Ecologies of Attention‹ questions what powerful phenomena, forces, connections and exchange relations remain hidden or obscured as a result. What methods, tools, strategies, or systems are required to reevaluate these connections and foster productive relationships? Which ingrained patterns need to be disrupted?
The starting point and vital forum of the four-day symposium are the so-called Assemblies – a series of concise presentations where participants introduce themselves and their work to one another. The Assemblies are complemented by invited contributions in the form of lectures, workshops, and artistic interventions.
A project within the framework of The Alliance of International Production Houses, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Assemblies
Assembly I
Ecologies of Attention – from co-existence towards multispecies cohabitation
Selenia Marinelli, Dan Xu, Constanza Javiera Ruiz, Ekaterina Golovko
Assembly II
Ecologies of Attention – the fragility of facts, normality and social norms
Martyna Marciniak, Marco Kramer, Ahnjili ZhuParris, Nancy Awori
Assembly III
Ecologies of Attention – listening to unrecognized forms of knowledge
Wencey Mendes, Sia Wen Di, Agoston Nagy, Felipe Shibuya, Tahila Mintz
Assembly IV
Ecologies of Attention – more than human sensing techniques
Ivan Penov, Carolina García Cataño, Connor Cook, Amanda Romero
Assembly V
Ecologies of Attention – living together beyond consumer societies
Yipei Lee, Khaled Alwarea, Ra’z Salvarita & Elledivine Wood, David Turturo, Nath Gélard & Thibaud Guichard
Journal entries
Program
08 November, 18 Uhr – Public Lecture
Melanie Sehgal: Ecologies of Attention, Techniques of Sensing
Why does it matter today, more than ever, to think about ecologies of attention, maybe even develop new ones? In her talk ›Ecologies of Attention, Techniques of Sensing‹, philosopher Melanie Sehgal explores the necessity and urgency to do so in today’s multifaceted ecological crisis. As part of the transdisciplinary symposium IMPACT23, she addresses issues surrounding attention, experience and sensing in the context of ecological disruption and asks: Could aesthetic practices in the arts and humanities help with fostering new techniques of sensing? Could they contribute to developing other sensibilities than those harbored by the modern, capitalist framework whose limits and destructive consequences are fully disclosed today?
Künstlerische Interventionen
Social Pleasure Center (SPC) is a hub and harbor for hosting access to somatic healing and communal activities for connection and resilience. It gathers primarily but not exclusively the LGBTQI+ community with a strong liaison to the Berlin dance and art scene. SPC intersects migrant cognitive labour, solidarity initiatives linked to social justice and is centered on pleasure as an organizing principle, in the line of a joyful yet militant feminist praxis. SPC is especially concerned with generating a culture paradigm that off-sets the imperative of a private and self-reliable self, promoting instead an intermediary zone of healing and belonging, beyond the nuclear family, the workplace and the entertainment industry. It has in mind the model of a community center, where activities are offered on a donation base, and it dreams of it being partly subsidized as an artistic space for agency building or social choreography.