MUZA, Auberge D’Italie, Merchants St, Valletta

22.11.18, 6:30 pm

Round Table

This key quote from the film ‘Duck Soup’, a comedy by the Marx Brothers on crisis and war of a banana republic, tackles a mayor problem of the current production of truth and its representation. Together with guests Maren Richter discusses and experiments on the discourse of ‘urgencies’ in an age of hyper-realities, a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. Especially since 2015 migration and border control have brought forth a militant imagery – the fabrication of a narrative of evidence – which aims to represent ‚urgencies’ and legitimizes radical dehumanising actions.

What role can art, exhibitions and art institutions take to create counter-narratives of mainstream debates and their politics of truth in order to produce a productive force, a space of negotiation that reconfigures that ‘me’ and ‘your eyes’ even, which the quote from ‚Duck Soup’ is talking about?

Can we (still) hijack dominant discourses? Produce narrative rifts? Offer forensic views or assert presence by absence? How can we speak of and think about the conjunctures of ‚crisis’? And narrate different stories to call attention to new factual spaces as well as symbolic spaces produced by manifestations of de-stabalising a „grand narrative“?

Round table with: Charlie Cauchi (artist, filmmaker and historian), Sandro Debono (art historian), Margerita Pule (artist and cultural worker), Maren Richter (curator and researcher), Antoine Cassar (poet and activist), Chakib Zidi (choreographer and dancer)/Dali Agrebi (performer and activist).