FABIEN GIRAUD & IDA SOULARD : THE SITE OF NOT
In conversation with Kodwo Eshun and the seminary Theory Fiction

The conference is open to the public and is in english and french.

“In this talk, we will introduce our individual research and collaborative projects through the recurring notion of “site”. Since their historical emergence in the 1960s, site-specific practices and discourses have become a normative framework and a standard of evaluation for any artistic gesture. Constructed as a practical and conceptual tool that once aspired to artistic and political emancipation, it now seems to work toward further alienation. This notion of “site”, which reemerged in many threads of contemporary discourses (“the plot”, “the platform”, “the Stack” ...), will be discussed both as a tool to unlock contemporary political dead ends and as a hinge in a revised history of the relations between art and rationality.”

Ida Soulard and Fabien Giraud co-founded The Matter of Contradiction in 2011, a series of seminars and workshops addressing the geological concept of the Anthropocene and its consequences for the theory of art. In 2012, they co-initiated Glass Bead, a research platform and journal launched in 2014 through a series of events in New York and Paris. They currently collaborate on a book entitled The Marfa Stratum.

The evening is the public part of the one-year colloquium “Thinking under Turbulence” that frames the curriculum during the transition of the CCC Master Programme in 2015/16 at Haute école d’art et de design in Genève. Contributors to the Colloquium are invited guests in conversation with CCC-students and faculty members. The one-year Colloquium takes place at
a transitional moment of CCC, the research-based programme on curatorial concerns in globalizing times and in techno-politics under new direction of Doreen Mende. It will offer time
to think how such a programme can process itself further and against itself in times of accelerationist imperatives brought by financial global capitalism. The Colloquium departs from literally “a speaking together”: from com- “together” + -loquium “speaking”. A speaking together outside/inside the academy. Therefore, the concept of the Colloquium does not propose thinking to be a philosophical method to study a subject matter but departs from a moment under conditions of turbulence when knowledge is in crisis that makes it necessary for us to think, to think differently.