The topics for this fourth edition are the (inter)cultural translation on the one hand and the ability / inability to narrate ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ by means of visual images. Following this point of departure, our speakers will examine that sort of global visual consensus that liberal multiculturalism introduced during the eighties, which seems to have promoted the proliferation of ambivalent images of the Other. What happens when we attempt to narrate and to translate difference from the point of view of the global / postcolonial studies? Does the untranslatable can be understood as an ideal condition for intercultural negotiation and tactical engagement with alterity in the same way that translatability is perceived as the starting point for a dialogical encounter between diverse visual cultures? These are some of the questions that will be addressed during the symposium.

Opening Speech: Mieke Bal

Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic and video artist. Areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many publications include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3rd edition 2009). Her view of interdisciplinary analysis in the Humanities and Social Sciences is expressed in the profile of what she has termed “cultural analysis”, the basis of ASCA. See the video clip on the right side of this page, where I explain the approach.
www.miekebal.org

Speaker: Encarnación Gutiérrez

Dr Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is Chair of Sociology at the University of Giessen. Her research is concerned with questions of the local face of global inequalities, queer-feminist decolonial epistemology and critical intersectional approaches to migration and diaspora studies. In her recent work on Migration, Domestic Work and Affect (2010), she explores the interface between coloniality, feminization of labour and migration policies; affective labour, biopolitics and racialization; decolonial ethics, conviviality and the Creolization of Human Rights, through the case of Latin American ‘undocumented’ migrant women, working as domestic workers in private households in Western Europe. Further, she is interested in debates contrasting the European sociological canon with the framework of coloniality. This interest has resulted in a co-edited collection with Manuela Boatcă and Sérgio Costa on Decolonizing European Sociology (2010).

Speaker: Joaquín Barriendos

Joaquín Barriendos teaches Latin American Art Studies and Visual Culture at Columbia University. Before joining the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2011, he taught at the University of Barcelona. He has been fellow-researcher at the Institute National d’Histoire de l’Art, and visiting-researcher in the Program in Museum Studies (New York University). His graduate dissertation was awarded the Marcos & Celia Maus Prize (UNAM best dissertation in History) and his doctoral dissertation obtained Honors Degree-Cum Laude in Theory, History, and Art Criticism. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, serves as a member of ILAS’ Executive Committee, collaborates with the Visual Culture in Europe Network, and is Chief Academic Curator of the Juan Acha Archive. He serves as well in the Editorial Board of Journal of Visual Culture (SAGE), Revista Hispánica Moderna (Columbia University, N.Y.), Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, and Journal of Global Studies and Contemporary Art (University of Barcelona). His book “Geoestética y transculturalidad” was awarded in 2007 the annual prize on art theory, conferred by the Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani. In 2010 he was commissioned to edit a multi-authored book, “Global Circuits: The Geography of Art and the New Configurations of Critical Thought”.