[spectre] UNTIE THE KNOT: Open call for conference

[Klara Petrović]

KONTEJNER | bureau for contemporary art praxis in partnership with
Photography association Organ Vida is organizing a two-day international
conference "Untie the Knot: Redefining Normativity in Love" as part of the
Extravagant Bodies festival. The two-day conference will take place at the
Grand venue of Cinema Europa in Zagreb on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st,
September 2019. We invite everybody interested to propose scientific,
theoretical and other investigative works on the topic of love!

Untie the Knot: Redefining Normativity in Love
Even though love is an emotion experienced by virtually everybody
everywhere, the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy, as Lauren
Berlant argues, “have been profoundly shaped by theories” (Berlant 2012).
While psychoanalytic theories have long served as the dominant explanatory
models of sexuality, subjectivity and desire, other modes of explanation
“have been offered by aesthetics, religion, and the fantasies of mass and
popular culture, which are not usually realistic but often claim to have
distilled emotional truths about love’s nature and force” (ibid.). There
are several aspects in which we wish to approach the topic of love through
this conference.

We begin with the most obvious connection - the relation between love and
sexuality. Here we’re interested in examining the concept of
mononormativity and tackle the alternative ways of constructing intimacy
and thus challenging common (mis)perceptions of polyamory. This also
involves exploring the connection and the difference between sexual and
non-sexual ways of loving and further discussing the broad spectrum of
asexuality, gray-asexuality and considering numerous manifestations of love
as caring labour.

We’re also focused on examining the link between love and politics.
Following bell hooks, who argued that love is a material power capable of
empowering both individuals and collectives, and drawing from Michael
Hardt’s conception of love as a generative and collective force, we wish to
challenge the modern concept of love - one that is limited to the “the
bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear
family”(Hardt, Negri 2004). We want to move away from the understanding of
love as a strictly private affair and consider it as a site for collective
“becoming-different” instead. On this note, we’re questioning love as a
commodity, considering the salability of love as a product mostly marketed
towards heterosexual couples and in that way normalizing heterosexuality
and monogamy.

In times of the ongoing rise of fascism and right-wing extremism on a
global level, we believe that it is necessary to think of the complex ways
in which love towards another “can be transferred towards a collective”
(Ahmed 2004). We want to understand not only love’s radical and
transformative potential, but the different ways in which it can be a
source of exclusion, domination and violence. Here we want to stress the
importance of the political struggle over the question - who has the right
to declare themselves as acting out of love - as posed by Sara Ahmed in The
Cultural Politics of Emotion.

Finally, we wish to investigate the relationship of love as subject of
culture and that of science. Looking at love as a distilled set of
symptoms, we want to question cultural and societal agency related to what
we understand as being or falling in love, but also terms such as
unconditional love widely used in familial settings. We are interested to
see how neuroscience, psychiatry, pharmacology, biology and other related
fields of research analyze, hypothesize and explain what love is and how it
is shaped either by chemical, cultural, biological or societal rules and
characteristics. Ultimately, we seek to explore whether this knowledge and
technological advances yield forms of misuse and abuse.

We invite researchers, academics, artists and others to submit their paper
proposals for the conference program. We are interested in presentations
that challenge existing theoretical as well as material and embodied
practices of love in order to move towards more unrestrained conceptions of
love.

The deadline for submission of abstracts (up to 500 words) and CV is May
15th 2019 on midnight.
Submissions can be sent to the following email address:
kontejner at kontejner.org and conference at organvida.com
If you have any questions, please contact us via emails
kontejner at kontejner.org and conference at organvida.com

Organizers:
KONTEJNER | bureau of contemporary art praxis
ORGAN VIDA — International Photography Organisation

Curatorial team: Luja Šimunović and Klara Petrović (KONTEJNER), Stahl
Stenslie (NO)

INFO: https://www.kontejner.org/en/vijesti/razvezi-vezu

-- 
*Curator at KONTEJNER <https://www.kontejner.org/>| bureau of contemporary
art praxis *
*personal: facebook <https://www.facebook.com/klara.petrovic.96>|
instagram  <https://www.instagram.com/kla.pet/>*
*+385 98 9182 899*
*EXTRAVAGANT BODIES: EXTRAVAGANT LOVE / September 2019*
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