curriculum-en

Curatorial Politics
M1/M2
English/French (texts)

Doreen Mende

Turning the inextricable [or, intractable] condition against itself

“Violence is at the beginning of thinking; it is the thing of thought, of reason.” (Denise Ferreira da Silva) Violence is also at the beginning of making; it is the thing of art. This is not a dilemma. But a matrix: Violence marks the rule of law, not as an event but as a condition. The seminar aims to problematize violence as an inextricable condition from which there is neither an escape nor an excuse nor an apology. This condition has always been formative and will inextricably continue to affect art as a concept and a practice of transcendental reason. Put differently, art is implicit as well as complicit with the rule of law (and signification) legitimizing colonial (juridical) and racial (symbolic) violence. There is an end to this only possibly at the end of art as we know it.
This year’s seminar will engage with the very difficult question how to make a research public, from a curatorial perspective, with the aim to rehearse how it could be possible to not reproduce the violence that is inscribed into our means of making as artists, curators, theorists, architects, researcher or designers. How could research become a set of practices to prepare the conditions for practicing a decoloniality to arrive, which will be needed for turning the inextricable [or, intractable] condition of violence against itself? These all are very difficult questions. The practice-based seminar will not claim to answer them. But it will try to create openings, responses, offerings, spaces, time-zones and constellations to think with.
We will read key texts by Denise Ferreira da Silva, MTL Collective, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. We will visit ongoing exhibitions nearby with the aim to analyse them with questions from the seminar. The assignment of the seminar consists of small exercises with concrete material from your own research, or otherwise, in relation to the reading of texts. Furthermore, it also is expected from the students to create independently and selfresponsibly a diary of terms, methods and concepts with the possible capacity of turning the inextricable [or, intractable] condition of violence against itself. –– The seminar resonates with the following two research processes: PARSE conference «Violence» including Yasmine Eid- Sabbagh and Denise Ferreira da Silva from 17 through 19 November 2021; the exhibition Saisis par l’art (working title) for the Musée du Luxembourg de Grand Palais in Paris in collaboration with the state collections of art Dresden planned for September 2022.

Cultural Studies
M1 et M2: Anne-Julie Raccoursier (en français et anglais)

Les Cultural Studies 2015/16 ouvrent un champ d’étude transdisciplinaire et critique qui prend pour objet les institutions, les pratiques et les formes culturelles dans leurs relations aux structures politiques dominantes, aux hiérarchies sociales et aux minorités marginalisées. L’enseignement met en relation les théories et les méthodes qui fondent ce champ d’étude avec des pratiques artistiques situées, discursives, interventionnistes. Le séminaire alternera exposés, lectures et travaux pratiques.

Études Politiques
M1/M2
French/English

Pierre Hazan
Début: 9 Octobre, 2017, 10.00

Faisons table rase du passé ?

Les révolutionnaires français rêvaient de faire table rase du passé. Mais force est de constater que le passé n’est pas encore passé, il a même un très grand avenir. La constitution de l’identité aussi bien personnelle que collective, le système de valeurs, la projection d’une société dans l’avenir dépend largement de la représentation qu’elle se fait de son passé. Le démantèlement des statues du général Lee à Charlottesville et de Christophe Colomb à New York, la destruction des œuvres d’art par Daech en Irak ou l’érection de monuments à Genève le montrent de manière saisissante. Comment se construit et se modifie le lien au passé et à quel passé ? Quel regard porter aujourd’hui sur le colonialisme et la traite esclavagiste ? Selon quelle lecture historique ? Selon quelle vision de la culture, de la vérité et de la justice ? L’enjeu de ce cours vise à mieux appréhender les ressorts de la représentation du passé dans l’espace public.

Publication : les étudiants seront amenés à travailler sur des œuvres en construction ou faisant l’objet d’une discussion sur leur destruction/démantèlement, ou qu’ils souhaiteraient détruire. Dans leur texte, les étudiants devront analyser les enjeux idéologiques et esthétiques, les dynamiques politiques, le rôle de l’artiste et des pouvoirs publics. L’ensemble de leurs contributions, éventuellement enrichies de contributions extérieures, feront l’objet d’une publication.

Pratiques artistiques situées
Situated Art Practices
M1/M2
French/English

Anne-Julie Raccoursier, Tarek Lakhrissi

The CCC ResearchMaster Program  promotes artistic research. It transforms the conception of artistic practices and develops independent information through the study of critical sources and formats. It explores the role of art in society and considers artistic practice as the production of organic knowledge in the context of production. The seminar, taught throughout the curriculum, is conducted in close collaboration with the Writing Research Practice seminar. It offers training in the methodologies of research through the means of art and allows students, based on discussions around their projects, to build devices to make their research public. It promotes a conception of research that is mutualized and step-by-step. It is based on a conception of artistic practice that is conscious of the differences in cultures and languages and concerned with the economic mechanisms of society and their political dimension. It develops critical, analytical and visionary strategies and encourages interventions – both individual and collective – with multifaceted meanings in a wide range of formats and situations. Research is carried out in technical reproduction media and experimental formats. The artistic practice is situated, discursive, interventionist, politically engaged and transdisciplinary. The Program supports art engaged in the public sphere or in civil society, understood as theater of debate and deliberation, as an intermediary place between private space and institutions.

Writing Research Practice
M1/M2
French/English

Çağla Aykaç

The Writing Research Practice Seminar is a space where you refine your individual research project and design, build your personal archive, and work your voice. It is also a space for self-reflexivity and for understanding where and how you stand in relation to your own research, and more generally in relation to research ethics and art research practice.

The Writing Research Practice Seminar works together with the Situated Art Practices Seminar.  While you will have opportunities to discuss your individual research punctually in tutorials and with your thesis advisors (2nd year), the Writing Research Practice seminar is a space for sharing your research with other students and getting feed-back on your writing throughout your two years at the CCC.

Each session of the Seminar is constructed around a chosen theme (archive, critique, method, voice, standpoint, kinship, power, time & space,..) with common assigned readings.  For each meeting, you are asked to bring additional readings related to your own research and a piece of your own writing. The Acte de Recherche you write during this seminar will be published at the end of the year and will be used as a presentation of your research.

Critical Studies
M1/M2
English

Gene Ray

Images of Civil War or the Civil Wars in the Image?
Debating Visuality, Monumentality, Coloniality

Alongside and around the “real” violence and terror that saturates late modernist everyday life, are the all-pervasive images of violence and terror. The image is “the basic unit of memory” (Sontag). There is no remembering and so no thinking, without the image and imagination (Aristotle). And yet some images are a “strike against understanding” (Kracauer). Flooded by images and the networked screens that produce and circulate them in new orders of magnitude, can we even be sure today that we know what an image is? The making and reproduction of images have become key technics of social control, as well as focal points of critique, resistance and uprising. The ethics and politics of the image, long debated, remain open problems: where does witnessing end and the violence of images begin? There is no image “that is not haunted by history” (Cadava). As the “tenacious function of making visible,” the image is “the eye of history” that sometimes “looks back” (Didi-Huberman), or speaks in the low-frequencies of “felt sound” (Campt). “The image of man,” Bataille wrote in 1947, “is inseparable, henceforth, to a gas chamber.” “There is no image of the gas chamber” (Lanzmann). “The idea of a universal right to see is a fraud” (Azoulay). This year, the critical studies seminar dwells in the debates that span the distance in time, poetics and memory politics between the film Shoa, Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 “fiction of the real,” and Raoul Peck’s 2021 documentary television series Exterminate All the Brutes: the first insists on the singularity of the Nazi Judeocide, underlined by a refusal of archival images; the second constructs new images of the contemporary from the archival fragments and absences of early modern genocide and continuing settler colonialism and racial capitalism. To open up the ethical and political problems, the main reading will be Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), supplemented by excerpts from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Eduardo Cadava, Tina M. Campt and Paul Gilroy.