May 26–Jun 2, 2006

Laboratory IN TRANSIT 06

I dance therefore I am: Bodies' Resistance to Globalisation

Lectures and talks
Free admittance; in English language, if not otherwise noted

In the In Transit Lab 06 the notion of body culture will be discussed by artists and scholars from Brazil, India, Europe, Africa, the USA and the Middle East. They describe and discuss an open horizon of cultural variety, which forms resistance to the rationality of modernity up to now.

As a subject of cultural identity and transformation, the body is playing an increasingly important role in the domain of arts as well as concerning the cultural shaping of the present. As the body is often embedded in cultural patterns reflected in and sustained by traditions, it also serves as a unique archive of collective knowledge rationalized only in part. How significant is this knowledge to the formation of cultural identity, in the design of social reality? Brazil, India and Africa have all put forward notions of art and culture free from a priori distinctions between body knowledge and mental history. In Brazil pop culture ranging from the samba to funk is offering a rich assortment of artistic idioms with enormous effects on cultural identities, social and political movements and has already transformed conflicts and created a new market of its own. In India artists are showing how historical myths and body techniques may reinterpret globalised conditions; and African dancers are reflecting colonial projections back onto a bodiless cultural discourse. May cultural politics stem from the body? What resistance does the body offer to the dynamism of globalised culture? And how is body knowledge related to cultural variety?

Johannes Odenthal


Funded by null