LATIN AMERICA: Contamination / Contagion / Symptom

Organized by: Liliana Gómez-Popescu / Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira
University of Zurich
Rämistrasse 59 (Alte Kantonsschule)

The metaphors and concepts of contamination and contagion are inscribed into semantics of the abject as well as into imaginaries of the threat of infections. They shape the symbolic, spatial and social orders and their respective affects. ‘Contaminations’ are both lived and conceptualized today as complex environmental, cultural, political and historical situations in which the catastrophe would be the last level of representation. We seek to bring together theoretical interventions and art research that draw on new reflections about (meta)cultural, epistemic models and the diverse materializations of contamination, contagion and symptom that identify emergent critical positions, agencies of residues of the past of societies and cultures of or in relationship with Latin America.

Program

Friday, 24th of November 2017

13.00 Opening and welcome: Yanina Welp (LZZ Zurich)
Introduction: Liliana Gómez-Popescu

Materialities of the symptom

13.30 Muriel Pic (Bern): “Cependant que je me désunis”. Henri Michaux et la connaissance par le symptôme
Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza (Paris): cartographies : morceaux choisis
Presentation: Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

15.30 Coffee Break

Meta-stasis and metastasis

16.00 Stephan Besser (Amsterdam): The Tropics as a Zone of Contagion in German Colonial Culture and Beyond
Charlotte Matter (Zurich): Symptom as Method: Infected Visions of Mexico
Presentation: Liliana Gómez-Popescu

19.00 Performance-Lecture
Ricardo Aleixo (Belo Horizonte) – at the Cabaret Voltaire

Saturday, 25th of November 2017

Figures and zones of contagion

10.00 Nanne Timmer (Leiden): Contagio y biopolítica en la narrativa latinoamericana del S.XXI. El caso de Cuba
Adriana López Labourdette (Bern): Zona zombi: contaminación, ambivalencia y espectralidad del monstruo caribeño contemporáneo
Presentation: Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

12.00 Lunch

Residues of contamination

13.00 Isabel Exner (Saarbrücken): Otro fin de la propiedad. Polución, tabu y apropiación según Michel Serres
Lisa Blackmore (Essex): (Contra)flujos: Ecologías líquidas y el paisaje en la República Dominicana
Presentation: Liliana Gómez-Popescu

15.00 Roundtable Discussion