Keynote Lectures

Discussion of theatrical experiments performed in streets and public spaces of the São Paulo neighborhood of Bom Retiro during the creative process of Bom Retiro 958 metros, by Teatro da Vertigem.

What options for political and economic justice do people have when the electoral process has been violated or corrupted, the media sequestered in the hands of power-brokers, and official institutions cannot adjudicate in a way that is seen as transparent and legitimate? "The Poltics of Passion" explains the resurgence and even centrality of the body in politics.

Miguel Rubio's lecture explores how dramatic languages expand and invade public space, converging with citizen actions. To this end, he looks at several recent artistic proposals that act on and in public spaces - inserting themselves into social processes in the context of contemporary Peruvian society.

The recent capitalist development in Brazil generated an institutionalization of cultural production in the country. The research in the arts, which previously operated against the grain of dominant logics, now frequently becomes a conformist site of alternative inclusion in capital’s ideological order. Dissonant voices in this process, including the voices of some theater groups in the city of São Paulo, look for critical ways of confronting the general depoliticization and commodification imposed by the bare necessities of survival.

The unconscious repression of the knowing-body is the greatest violence of the colonial enterprise from a the micropolitical perspective. Such violence is at the marrow of the modern Western culture, which still structures us. Today, the toxic effects of this unconscious repression have reached their limit, generating the vast crisis in which we are immersed.

How did a feminist film scholar trained in post-structuralist theory end up running a software lab? In answering that question, this talk engages various histories in the  development of computational systems in order to argue that we need more humanities scholars to take seriously issues in the design and implementation of software systems.

The Poetics of Grief brings to light deeply discomforting issues and proposes to question citizens through diverse symbolic means. It refers to proposals that intervene in public space calling attention to the dangers of forgetting crucial past events; events which move us away from triumphalism and that insist, over and over again, on the need to continue processing the worst of the past.