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Unknown(s)

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Revue « In Vivo Arts »

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Published on Monday, April 29, 2024

Abstract

In our relentless effort to offer a stage for striving emerging voices in contemporary Performing Arts and Cinema, the In Vivo Arts team is preparing to add another language to our platform – Spanish – and encourage Hispanophone researchers and artists to join us on our journey. On behalf of a thus enlarged editorial team, we would like to propose a call for contributions closely inspired by our aims and founding principles. The topic brought forward for In Vivo Art’s issue no. 2 is: Unknow(s).

Announcement

Argument

In our relentless effort to offer a stage for striving emerging voices in contemporary Performing Arts and Cinema, the In Vivo Arts team is preparing to add another language to our platform – Spanish – and encourage Hispanophone researchers and artists to join us on our journey. On behalf of a thus enlarged editorial team, we would like to propose a call for contributions closely inspired by our aims and founding principles. The topic brought forward for In Vivo Art’s issue no. 2 is: UNKNOWN(s)

Contemporary research in Performing Arts and Cinema continues to be largely – if not entirely – focused on works and artists enjoying a certain notoriety on stages and screens, even when part of so-called “alternative” spaces. Notoriety, in this case, is no longer necessarily associated with artistic expression, but with what could be seen as levels of “professionalization” within the Performing Arts and Cinema. In opposition to this process of identification of “professionals” stands the interest in “amateur” theatre and cinema, as a result of which a binary socio-economic “reading” has come to prevail over an aesthetic interpretation.

Recent research in this direction – from Keith Arrowsmith’s The Methuen Amateur Theatre Handbook (2002) or Charles Tepperman’s Amateur Cinema. The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923-1960 (2014) to studies on amateur theatre, Le Théâtre des amateurs et l’Expérience de l’Art (2011) by Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux, Marie-Christine Bordeaux and Jean Caune – illustrates some of the implications of such an approach. Our aim is to question this vision opposing "professional" to so-called "amateur" arts and try to identify and make visible theatrical and cinematographic works and artists who could be qualified – for lack of another concept – as UNKNOWN(s).

Aware of the difficulty of formulating all too limiting “criteria of unknowability”, we would like to draw conceptual inspiration from the Foucauldian notion of “buried knowledge”, calling thus to “dig up” such artistic productions and question their status and scope in our current societies.

By casting a “genealogical” light onto today's stages and screens, we hope to uncover a whole series of artistic acts which find themselves disqualified as "local, discontinuous (...) not legitimized", "insufficiently developed (…) naive, below the threshold of knowledge [and aesthetic formalisation] required.”[2] Hardly responsive to the manifestos and demands of any one of today’s theoretical, media, political-economic authorities, in short, not being (yet) part of systems of knowledge-power, such creations are thereby reserved for a silent swarm of “unknown” oeuvres, or non-oeuvres.

Unknown, certainly, but all the more alive, animated by desires and freedoms, rather than duties and necessities. By proposing to reveal them, this issue therefore aims to sketch out a map of the UNKNOWN(s) in the Performing Arts and Cinema, which could help us draw a finer, more granular, picture of contemporary aesthetics (the social, political and even anthropological implications of which still remain to be understood) and, also, envisage the aesthetics of tomorrow. Unknown, little known, misunderstood – that is the challenge posed by this issue.

Mapping does not mean “framing”! Not wishing to establish any legitimacy criteria, it will be especially a question of discovering and tracing any such “out of frame” creations of today’s stages and screens, a process which could also follow a dynamic whereby artists propose themselves and their works as being UNKNOWN(s). We thus encourage those interested to present their own works as part of this issue, to do so without needing to attach a critical and objective reading thereof.

Possible contributions may include (without being limited to) the following:

  • abandoned artistic projects (of which no doubt many originated in the context of the Covid-19 crisis);
  • ongoing projects not (yet) benefiting from institutional and/or financial support (if only upheld solely by the artists’ creative impulse and passion);
  • completed or ongoing student projects;
  • works and artists on the fringes of stages and screens (on media platforms and networks, such as Instagram, Medium, YouTube, Vimeo, and therefore addressing an exclusively virtual audience);
  • works and artists at the crossroads of disciplines, unable to assert themselves within systems operating via “codes” and “labels”;
  • works and artists stigmatised according to “cultural capital” conditionalities within networks of recognition and co-optation;
  • “naive” artworks or artworks produced by individuals who are minoritised (or not recognised) as artists, or who do not even seek to identify as such (children, people with disabilities, etc.).

Submission guidelines

Proposals for articles, essays, interviews, as well as presentations of works and/or artists (300 – 400 words), in English, French, or Spanish, accompanied by a short biography must be sent by email, to invivoarts@gmail.com, 

no later than October 15, 2024, at midnight (CEST).

The selected contributions (to be communicated by the end of October 2024) will be published in In Vivo Art’s second issue – UNKNOWN(s). As such, the final version of the contribution must be sent no later than January 31, 2025, at midnight (CEST), with the release of the issue being planned for March 2024.

The types and length of the contributions should be as follows:

  • Research papers/case studies: 5,000-10,000 words
  • Opinion essays: 3,000-5,000 words
  • Interviews: 3,000-5,000 words
  • Reviews (books, performances, films): 1,500-2,500 words
  • Presentations of one’s own artistic itinerary and works (textual and/or audiovisual): to be discussed with the In Vivo Arts editor once the proposal has been accepted.

The publication of the UNKNOWN(s) issue will furthermore be an opportunity to offer readers a renewed version of the platform – more dynamic and interactive – in consonance with the scope of an online art academic publication.

We finally wish to reiterate the collaborative nature of this project; the ever-growing quality of the contributions received since the creation of the platform testifies to the mutual trust and appreciation between our contributors and editors. As such, we would appeal to those interested in the forthcoming issue to help with sharing this call within peer groups, universities, and art schools, as well as with artists wanting to publicise their works via the In Vivo Arts collective.

[1] Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société. Cours au Collège de France (1975-1976), eds. Mauro Bertani et Alessandro Fontana (Digital Edition: Gallimard le Seuil,  2012), p.10 [our translation].

Coordinator of the issue

  • Alexandru BUMBAS – INALCO / Bogotá's National Theatre's School of Dramatic Art (Colombia)
  • Anca POP – Royal Holloway, London University

Scientific Committee

  • Juan José APOLINAR ROMERO – University of the Andes (Colombia) / University of Salamanca
  • Maria José ÁVILA GARCÍA – National Pedagogical University of Bogotá (Colombie)
  • Mélissa BERTRAND – LIRAA (University New Sorbonne)
  • Mathilde BAÏSSUS – University Saint-Denis
  • Nadin MAI – curator The Arts of Slow Cinema (https://theartsofslowcinema.com/)
  • Laura-Florina STAN – University of Hankuk in Foreign Studies, Seoul

Places

  • Paris, France (75)

Event attendance modalities

Full online event


Date(s)

  • Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Keywords

  • art, spectacle vivant

Contact(s)

  • Alexandru Bumbas
    courriel : invivoarts [at] gmail [dot] com

Reference Urls

Information source

  • Alexandru Bumbas
    courriel : invivoarts [at] gmail [dot] com

License

CC0-1.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

To cite this announcement

« Unknown(s) », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Monday, April 29, 2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/zbgv

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