Utopic Performances: Reimagining the Common conference report

On November 18-19, 2024, the Critical Humanities Spaces Network organized “Utopic Performances: Reimagining the Common,” a two-day conference held at the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris—FMSH (a large institute that fosters research in the humanities and social sciences), in coordination with the Centre de recherche sur les arts et le langage—CRAL (Center for Research on Arts and Language), a research center within the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales—EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). The second afternoon the conference took place at the “6b,” an artists-run collective building in Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris. CRAL served as the administrative coordinator for the conference. Additionally, we were priviledged to have the partnership of the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB). Funding for the project was provided by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and its Membership Activity Fund. Along with the success of the conference, which was filmed and will be up on our website soon, the partnerships we forged with the FMSH, CRAL, the 6b, and the CCCB promise to continue to grow.

Our first session featured three speakers. Maurits van Bever Donker, co-chair of the CHSN, board member of the CHCI, and Director of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape, gave the first paper, entitled In the Press of History, one of a series of “scenes” created by South African sculptor Johannes Segogela in 1994 to mark the the transition from apartheid to postapartheid, and staging questions around the nature of history, its production, its “uses and abuses.” Playing with concepts of time, placing us within the press of time, pressing us, Segogela’s scene begins to open towards the question of the “for us” that shapes both time and history. In his paper, Dr. van Bever Donker examined the work of history and its connection to concepts of futurity and utopia, on the one hand, and the possibilities of non-anthropomorphic time that, nonetheless, is turned towards us, towards and for an understanding of the human on the other.

Our second panelist was Marta Segarra, Research Professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), member of CRAL, and Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona. In a talk entiteld Rereading Kinship, Dr. Segarra addressed the ways in which feminist movement and theories have reconsidered the notion of kinship. In particular, the concept of family have been extended beyond blood ties and formal alliances, in what has been called queer kinship. Dr. Segarra’s talk looked at recent feminist reflections on interspecies kinship, suggesting that a radical rethinking of the relationship that humans have with other living beings would allow for a radical reconfiguration of the common.

The last talk in this panel, Utopic Temporalities, was given by Katharine Wallerstein, co-chair of the CHSN, and researcher at CRAL and at the CHR. Dr. Wallerstein presented utopic spaces as openings in which a “living otherwise” proceeds not as a totalising formulation but as a de-articulation of the real within a shared aesthetic field in which alternatives can be envisioned and experienced. Rather than an historical end, the utopic traverses a past and a future marked by desire–for political, cultural, social, intellectual, epistemological transformation, and for desire itself. Looking to examples of utopic moments and spaces, she traced the transversal and unfixed nature of utopian projects that exceed life-as-it-is and the parameters of the given in ways critical to our continued invention and reinvention of the social, the common, the world.

For the second session, Fiamma Montezemolo, artist and professor in the Department of Cinema & Digital Media at the University of California, Davis presented her film Echo. Set on the border between Mexico and USA, Echo is an ethnographic research piece on the afterlife and “echoes” of nine art works that were part of the two-decades old public art event, inSite. Echo revisits the scenes of these curatorial and artistic interventions, emerging both as a concept and a practice that assembles the futures of art works beyond their expected ruins and remains. The afterlife of each of these works raises different questions on social art, on its ethics, on its methods, on the people involved in the projects, on the city itself and its urban cycle, and on the future of public sculpture.

Our last panel of the day assembled architect and 6b founder Julien Beller, CCCB director Judit Carrera, and Andrés Claro, CHSN member who teaches in the Doctorate in Philosophy (Aesthetics) at the Universidad de Chile. In his talk Quelle architecture pour les communs ?, Beller, who joined us by video from Mayotte, shared a number of his “social architecture” projects in Mayotte and in Madagascar, based on collaborative design and participative construction, and placing the inhabitant at the heart of the construction of the city.

In her talk Public Space and Democracy: the role of architecture and the arts, Judit Carrera discussed the ways in which public spaces embed and potentially promote key immaterial and political principles such as equality of access, free speech and pluralism. Inspired by the distinction between urbs and civitas (Françoise Choay), in she argued that cultural spaces—theatres, museums and art centers, cinemas and alike—are, together with educational spaces, not only key urban physical spaces but also essential players in the promotion and defense of an inclusive and democratic public sphere.

Lastly, Andrés Claro’s talk, Figures of Utopia: Poetic Topologies - Communal Topologies, looked at the figural conditions of possibility of the revolutions of utopian thought over time, paying attention to how dominant habits of language shape their characteristic socio-political, urban and metaphysical orders. He looked briefly at five examples of literary utopias: (i) the ‘idealising Eutopia’ of classical metaphor in Plato’s Republic; (ii) the ‘abyssal Dystopia’ of modern irony in J. Swift's Gulliver's Travels; (iii) the ‘revolutionary Pantopia’ of nineteenth-century infinity in A. Blanqui’s L’éternité par les astres; (iv) the ‘kaleidoscopic Paratopia’ of contemporary montage in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; and (v) the ‘Babelic Asintopia’ or actuality of translation.

Our fourth panel took place the morning of the 19th, with Ozge Derman, sociologist and lecturer at Sciences Po and Sorbonne University in Paris, graduate student and curator Madeleine Planeix-Crocker, and Philippe Roussin, emeritus researcher at the CNRS, and member of CRAL. Dr. Derman openened the panel with her talk, Performative transitions in time and space: activism through art in social movements, in which she discussed activism through art in New York’s Occupy Wall Street (2011) and Istanbul’s Gezi movement (2013), which fostered the creation of ephemeral spaces and somewhat a new “we.” In each, artists and activists contributed to the “collective improvisation” (Citton 2010) of a utopic collectivity where insurgent everyday life and aesthetic experience were intermingled within and beyond those movements of occupation.

Madeline Planeix-Crocker’s talk, Le Plateau : A Conversation Piece, looked at the piece “The Surplus of the Non-Producer” (2016-2023) facilitated by French artist and educator Ève Gabriel Chabanon. Looking at the collaborative nature of the production process, Planeix-Crocker described the improvisational and painstaking labor that contributed to an expanded understanding of the piece : one not only made of plaster, pigment, and glue, but of negotiations, debates, and dialogue. Approaching "Le Plateau" as a conversation piece, she argued, is ultimately a manner of valuing the immaterial work that courses through its creation.

Lastly, Philippe Roussin’s talk Ecotopia : Utopie et responsabilité, looked at the place of utopia today. For the first time since More, he argued, rather than looking forward to a better human society, utopia as a discourse no longer appears ahead of us but behind us, belonging to the past and no longer to the future, which is now presented dystopically, thus raising the question of the end of utopia.

The conference ended with a visit to the 6b, in which we visited the grounds, met with resident artists, and exchanged with members of the leadership team about the vision and project of the 6b as a utopic enterprise.