Articles by Elia Ntaousani
Godard’s Contempt. Essays from the London Consortium, Oct 2012
Book Chapters by Elia Ntaousani
Lifestyle Mobilities: Intersections of Travel, Leisure and Migration, Oct 2013
of (Un)Belonging: Reflections on Strangeness and Self, 2012
"For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist point... more "For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist points out, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition: ‘The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity – the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.’ Except that on the one hand, according to the philosopher Chul-Han, globalising means not merely that Here is linked with There; more likely, a global Here is produced, while There is being constantly moved and removed – and so is accordingly the figure of the Foreigner. On the other, the contemporary human turns into something more than a nomad: a touristic figure that experiences culture (Kultur in German) by travelling the terrestrial and cybernetic space with her home virtually or pragmatically ‘on tour’.
This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, but also the conceptual shift from identity as continuity of a single dramatis persona to its instantaneous alterations, if not to the interrelationships between a particular space-time and the Self. ‘Depending on who is looking, the exotic is the other or it is me,’ writes inter alia Minh-ha in her effort to investigate travelling as the par excellence process of othering within this era of ‘identity crisis’. In fact, the Other constitutes not an off-shore figure anymore but part of our new larger family, global from scratch; she lingers in its core, whilst exoticising familiar events. By drawing on Bourriaud’s discourse of Alter-modernity, this paper wishes then to instead introduce the Alter as difference that is neither intrinsic nor distant but rather celebrates the alternative as such."
Talk at gallery space by Elia Ntaousani
Conference Papers by Elia Ntaousani
For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist points... more For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist points out, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition: ‘The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity – the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.’ Except that on the one hand, according to the philosopher Chul-Han, globalising means not merely that Here is linked with There; more likely, a global Here is produced, while There is being constantly moved and removed – and so is accordingly the figure of the Foreigner. On the other, the contemporary human turns into something more than a nomad: a touristic figure that experiences culture (Kultur in German) by travelling the terrestrial and cybernetic space with her home virtually or pragmatically ‘on tour’.
This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, but also the conceptual shift from identity as continuity of a single dramatis persona to its instantaneous alterations, if not to the interrelationships between a particular space-time and the Self. ‘Depending on who is looking, the exotic is the other or it is me,’ writes inter alia Minh-ha in her effort to investigate travelling as the par excellence process of othering within this era of ‘identity crisis’. In fact, the Other constitutes not an off-shore figure anymore but part of our new larger family, global from scratch; she lingers in its core, whilst exoticising familiar events. By drawing on Bourriaud’s discourse of Alter-modernity, this paper wishes then to instead introduce the Alter as difference that is neither intrinsic nor distant but rather celebrates the alternative as such.
The twenty-first century enters new dimensions in navigating, while satellite technology and its ... more The twenty-first century enters new dimensions in navigating, while satellite technology and its Global Positioning System introduce new spectra of space and time to the speculation of the contemporary era. On one hand, cosmos is no more perceived as a pre-existent substance or as an acquired ontological identity but rather as a performative continuum, being as doing, a world in becoming. On the other, the former obsession for both scientific objectivity and the nominal/real essence of things leaves nowadays more room for empirical and art-based research as an equally, if not more important means to knowledge. For art is neither prettifying nor merely depicting our mundus: contemporary artists question the world, disrupt its order so that they reveal its structure – or take it to the limits in order to reveal its potential. “The artists are inventing at the moment this new modernity, which is global from scratch”, to quote Bourriaud. “On one side, you have artists who are really trying to explore the planet in a different way and artists who try to explore time as if it were a jungle or a desert in a way”.
By juxtaposing Charles Avery’s project The Islanders with Ioannis Michalous’ Aer( )sculptures, this paper oscillates between art practices of enquiring geographical imagination and scientific modes of approaching the world’s imaginary. While Avery’s drawings investigate the inhabitants, topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, Michalous’ solidified air forms are bringing memory into future time through silica aerogel, a material produced at NASA for the Mars Pathfinder and the Stardust missions.
“I find myself a wanderer in a world rapidly growing smaller”, confesses Isamu Noguchi in the twe... more “I find myself a wanderer in a world rapidly growing smaller”, confesses Isamu Noguchi in the twentieth century. Aptly termed as ‘world citizen’, the American-Japanese artist is meant to serve as the unselfconscious prototype of a new reality; a cosmos in which relocation, migration, metoikesis and mobility of any kind emerge not merely as the norm but actually as much appreciated lifestyles. Except that the contemporary human turns into something more than a nomad: a touristic figure that experiences culture by travelling terrestrial and cybernetic spaces with her home virtually or pragmatically ‘on tour’.
The paper seeks to explore this very slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, the hypothesis envisioning Home not as an intellectual term, a notion that waits to be filled by a geographical meaning, but rather as a corporeal aesthesis, an experience that emerges in the process of its development. Besides, the former obsession for the acquisition of a clearly defined ontological Identity has given nowadays its place to the spectrum of performativity for the speculation of a being as doing. The empirical home is thus slipping from an outer category to an inner topology - from an external to an embodied embedded cognition. Focusing on the intrinsic link between home and identity, this paper embarks upon investigating not only the impact of contemporary mobilities on the former but also the conceptual shift of the latter from the continuity of a single dramatis persona to the instantaneous interdependencies between a certain space-time and the self.
If the overall notion of No Man’s Land generates from our necessity to possess a land so that we ... more If the overall notion of No Man’s Land generates from our necessity to possess a land so that we can affirm our existence, then, in order to repudiate the ownership discourse, we firstly need to dismantle our connection with the whatever territory and find other forms of self-affirmation – if not of existence. After referring to the Not yet/Not anymore and the Never One’s Land as to the at least two distinctive types of the concept under investigation, this paper will question the possibility of finding such a piece of the latter type, nowadays that almost every inch of the terrestrial globe has already been mapped with basically no terrain left either unknown or unowned (or at least ‘under dispute’). “There is no terra incognitae any more”, upholds the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud when talking about the 2009 Altermodern TATE triennial exhibition: “the last one is history; the last continent to be discovered is time”.
Except that nothing seems to be as solid as a continent anymore: our mundus resembles a marine fluidity or rather an archipelago of modern cultures, all global from scratch, of clusters and constellations that do not pre-exist but emerge in the process of their formation. The twenty-first century enters new political dimensions in navigating, while (satellite) navigation technology and its most broadly known Global Positioning System introduce new spectra of time and space to the speculation of the contemporary era. For Mihalache, what we have to explore is the cyber space-time continuum we are in, one that is conceived as an aggregation of multimedia architectures resulting from the blend of space and time. How does then the No Man’s Land looks like nowadays in these globalised societies of omnipresence, where every There is just another Here in the sense that every point of the rhizome can or may be linked with whatever other one? What are its actual coordinates? Does it have any topography?
Conceived by The Builders Association in 2007, Continuous city is multi-media theatre work that meditates on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation, of living and leaving, stretch us to the maximum as our ‘networked selves’ simultaneously occupy multiple locations. By showing the story of the launch of a social networking website both onstage and online, Continuous city serves as the example of a multimedia architecture that mingles the real, the virtual and the imaginary, on one hand, the global and the local, on the other. The “online staging” of the real website http://xubu.cc/ becomes part of the “digital theatre onstage” as people’s recordings get incorporated in the plot, while a third “virtual theatre” emerges though Deb’s blog http://continuouscity.blogspot.com, a chronicle of cities, one blending into the next. By analysing the Continuous City case, I am not only insinuating that home is travel and travel is home, but also questioning navigation and orientation in such a no man’s land of technologically constituted Kul-TourRealities.
"„In the late twentieth century, after all, we are ourselves literally embodied writing technolog... more "„In the late twentieth century, after all, we are ourselves literally embodied writing technologies. That is part of the implosion of gender in sex and language, in biology and syntax, enabled by Western technoscience.“
Donna J. Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, p. 128.
These thoughts were the stimulus for this paper’s effort to treat the notions of ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ through the controversial points of view, emerged among the feminist writings of the 1970s, the historians and psychoanalysts of the 1980s.While post-stucturalists like J. Butler are passing from gender denaturalization to the undoing of gender, brain scientists speak about a potential underestimation of innate biology at its equation with the anatomical sex; hormones and neurochemicals, constantly changing the brain state, not taken into account. ‘Gender’ constitutes in this sense the key term that is being posed and reposed, thought and rethought, done and undone. My paper will be thus divided into three parts that shall refer to a critical vision of gender categories in various discursive domains.
First part will treat the intrinsic introduction of gender as notion during the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to contest the naturalisation of the bipartite sex difference of men from women, male from female, in multiple arenas of struggle. Despite having passed from the ‘biological’ (sexual difference) to the ‘ontological determinism’ (desire) through the ‘social constructivism’ (power), the notion of “gender” remains trapped within the oppressive Western binarism culture/nature, and therefore the second part will explore the new ways of thinking gender that emerge in the 1990s towards a deconstruction or denaturalisation of this notion; that is, gender as representation and as subjective identity. Although Butler’s theory of performativity did succeed not only to disqualify normative analytical categories leading to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to release both genders and their social frame of reference from any determinism, the third part will not only show in what extent this very notion of gender (as doing) is nowadays again in crisis but also inquire the possible explanations for the impoverishment of gender and therefore for the necessity of its undoing. A mysterious elsewhere will emerge as a sort of agency that motivates us and establishes our sexuality, whose full meaning we ignore. The innate neurochemical biology of Brizendine will thus broaden up the cognitive fields and open new perspectives of rethinking gender, the mysterious elsewhere and -why not?- biology itself.
"
Papers by Elia Ntaousani
For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist points... more For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist points out, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition: ‘The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity – the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.’ Except that on the one hand, according to the philosopher Chul-Han, globalising means not merely that Here is linked with There; more likely, a global Here is produced, while There is being constantly moved and removed – and so is accordingly the figure of the Foreigner. On the other, the contemporary human turns into something more than a nomad: a touristic figure that experiences culture (Kultur in German) by travelling the terrestrial and cybernetic space with her home virtually or pragmatically ‘on tour’. This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citiz...
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Articles by Elia Ntaousani
Book Chapters by Elia Ntaousani
This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, but also the conceptual shift from identity as continuity of a single dramatis persona to its instantaneous alterations, if not to the interrelationships between a particular space-time and the Self. ‘Depending on who is looking, the exotic is the other or it is me,’ writes inter alia Minh-ha in her effort to investigate travelling as the par excellence process of othering within this era of ‘identity crisis’. In fact, the Other constitutes not an off-shore figure anymore but part of our new larger family, global from scratch; she lingers in its core, whilst exoticising familiar events. By drawing on Bourriaud’s discourse of Alter-modernity, this paper wishes then to instead introduce the Alter as difference that is neither intrinsic nor distant but rather celebrates the alternative as such."
Talk at gallery space by Elia Ntaousani
Conference Papers by Elia Ntaousani
This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, but also the conceptual shift from identity as continuity of a single dramatis persona to its instantaneous alterations, if not to the interrelationships between a particular space-time and the Self. ‘Depending on who is looking, the exotic is the other or it is me,’ writes inter alia Minh-ha in her effort to investigate travelling as the par excellence process of othering within this era of ‘identity crisis’. In fact, the Other constitutes not an off-shore figure anymore but part of our new larger family, global from scratch; she lingers in its core, whilst exoticising familiar events. By drawing on Bourriaud’s discourse of Alter-modernity, this paper wishes then to instead introduce the Alter as difference that is neither intrinsic nor distant but rather celebrates the alternative as such.
By juxtaposing Charles Avery’s project The Islanders with Ioannis Michalous’ Aer( )sculptures, this paper oscillates between art practices of enquiring geographical imagination and scientific modes of approaching the world’s imaginary. While Avery’s drawings investigate the inhabitants, topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, Michalous’ solidified air forms are bringing memory into future time through silica aerogel, a material produced at NASA for the Mars Pathfinder and the Stardust missions.
The paper seeks to explore this very slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, the hypothesis envisioning Home not as an intellectual term, a notion that waits to be filled by a geographical meaning, but rather as a corporeal aesthesis, an experience that emerges in the process of its development. Besides, the former obsession for the acquisition of a clearly defined ontological Identity has given nowadays its place to the spectrum of performativity for the speculation of a being as doing. The empirical home is thus slipping from an outer category to an inner topology - from an external to an embodied embedded cognition. Focusing on the intrinsic link between home and identity, this paper embarks upon investigating not only the impact of contemporary mobilities on the former but also the conceptual shift of the latter from the continuity of a single dramatis persona to the instantaneous interdependencies between a certain space-time and the self.
Except that nothing seems to be as solid as a continent anymore: our mundus resembles a marine fluidity or rather an archipelago of modern cultures, all global from scratch, of clusters and constellations that do not pre-exist but emerge in the process of their formation. The twenty-first century enters new political dimensions in navigating, while (satellite) navigation technology and its most broadly known Global Positioning System introduce new spectra of time and space to the speculation of the contemporary era. For Mihalache, what we have to explore is the cyber space-time continuum we are in, one that is conceived as an aggregation of multimedia architectures resulting from the blend of space and time. How does then the No Man’s Land looks like nowadays in these globalised societies of omnipresence, where every There is just another Here in the sense that every point of the rhizome can or may be linked with whatever other one? What are its actual coordinates? Does it have any topography?
Conceived by The Builders Association in 2007, Continuous city is multi-media theatre work that meditates on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation, of living and leaving, stretch us to the maximum as our ‘networked selves’ simultaneously occupy multiple locations. By showing the story of the launch of a social networking website both onstage and online, Continuous city serves as the example of a multimedia architecture that mingles the real, the virtual and the imaginary, on one hand, the global and the local, on the other. The “online staging” of the real website http://xubu.cc/ becomes part of the “digital theatre onstage” as people’s recordings get incorporated in the plot, while a third “virtual theatre” emerges though Deb’s blog http://continuouscity.blogspot.com, a chronicle of cities, one blending into the next. By analysing the Continuous City case, I am not only insinuating that home is travel and travel is home, but also questioning navigation and orientation in such a no man’s land of technologically constituted Kul-TourRealities.
Donna J. Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, p. 128.
These thoughts were the stimulus for this paper’s effort to treat the notions of ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ through the controversial points of view, emerged among the feminist writings of the 1970s, the historians and psychoanalysts of the 1980s.While post-stucturalists like J. Butler are passing from gender denaturalization to the undoing of gender, brain scientists speak about a potential underestimation of innate biology at its equation with the anatomical sex; hormones and neurochemicals, constantly changing the brain state, not taken into account. ‘Gender’ constitutes in this sense the key term that is being posed and reposed, thought and rethought, done and undone. My paper will be thus divided into three parts that shall refer to a critical vision of gender categories in various discursive domains.
First part will treat the intrinsic introduction of gender as notion during the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to contest the naturalisation of the bipartite sex difference of men from women, male from female, in multiple arenas of struggle. Despite having passed from the ‘biological’ (sexual difference) to the ‘ontological determinism’ (desire) through the ‘social constructivism’ (power), the notion of “gender” remains trapped within the oppressive Western binarism culture/nature, and therefore the second part will explore the new ways of thinking gender that emerge in the 1990s towards a deconstruction or denaturalisation of this notion; that is, gender as representation and as subjective identity. Although Butler’s theory of performativity did succeed not only to disqualify normative analytical categories leading to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to release both genders and their social frame of reference from any determinism, the third part will not only show in what extent this very notion of gender (as doing) is nowadays again in crisis but also inquire the possible explanations for the impoverishment of gender and therefore for the necessity of its undoing. A mysterious elsewhere will emerge as a sort of agency that motivates us and establishes our sexuality, whose full meaning we ignore. The innate neurochemical biology of Brizendine will thus broaden up the cognitive fields and open new perspectives of rethinking gender, the mysterious elsewhere and -why not?- biology itself.
"
Papers by Elia Ntaousani
This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, but also the conceptual shift from identity as continuity of a single dramatis persona to its instantaneous alterations, if not to the interrelationships between a particular space-time and the Self. ‘Depending on who is looking, the exotic is the other or it is me,’ writes inter alia Minh-ha in her effort to investigate travelling as the par excellence process of othering within this era of ‘identity crisis’. In fact, the Other constitutes not an off-shore figure anymore but part of our new larger family, global from scratch; she lingers in its core, whilst exoticising familiar events. By drawing on Bourriaud’s discourse of Alter-modernity, this paper wishes then to instead introduce the Alter as difference that is neither intrinsic nor distant but rather celebrates the alternative as such."
This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, but also the conceptual shift from identity as continuity of a single dramatis persona to its instantaneous alterations, if not to the interrelationships between a particular space-time and the Self. ‘Depending on who is looking, the exotic is the other or it is me,’ writes inter alia Minh-ha in her effort to investigate travelling as the par excellence process of othering within this era of ‘identity crisis’. In fact, the Other constitutes not an off-shore figure anymore but part of our new larger family, global from scratch; she lingers in its core, whilst exoticising familiar events. By drawing on Bourriaud’s discourse of Alter-modernity, this paper wishes then to instead introduce the Alter as difference that is neither intrinsic nor distant but rather celebrates the alternative as such.
By juxtaposing Charles Avery’s project The Islanders with Ioannis Michalous’ Aer( )sculptures, this paper oscillates between art practices of enquiring geographical imagination and scientific modes of approaching the world’s imaginary. While Avery’s drawings investigate the inhabitants, topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, Michalous’ solidified air forms are bringing memory into future time through silica aerogel, a material produced at NASA for the Mars Pathfinder and the Stardust missions.
The paper seeks to explore this very slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, the hypothesis envisioning Home not as an intellectual term, a notion that waits to be filled by a geographical meaning, but rather as a corporeal aesthesis, an experience that emerges in the process of its development. Besides, the former obsession for the acquisition of a clearly defined ontological Identity has given nowadays its place to the spectrum of performativity for the speculation of a being as doing. The empirical home is thus slipping from an outer category to an inner topology - from an external to an embodied embedded cognition. Focusing on the intrinsic link between home and identity, this paper embarks upon investigating not only the impact of contemporary mobilities on the former but also the conceptual shift of the latter from the continuity of a single dramatis persona to the instantaneous interdependencies between a certain space-time and the self.
Except that nothing seems to be as solid as a continent anymore: our mundus resembles a marine fluidity or rather an archipelago of modern cultures, all global from scratch, of clusters and constellations that do not pre-exist but emerge in the process of their formation. The twenty-first century enters new political dimensions in navigating, while (satellite) navigation technology and its most broadly known Global Positioning System introduce new spectra of time and space to the speculation of the contemporary era. For Mihalache, what we have to explore is the cyber space-time continuum we are in, one that is conceived as an aggregation of multimedia architectures resulting from the blend of space and time. How does then the No Man’s Land looks like nowadays in these globalised societies of omnipresence, where every There is just another Here in the sense that every point of the rhizome can or may be linked with whatever other one? What are its actual coordinates? Does it have any topography?
Conceived by The Builders Association in 2007, Continuous city is multi-media theatre work that meditates on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation, of living and leaving, stretch us to the maximum as our ‘networked selves’ simultaneously occupy multiple locations. By showing the story of the launch of a social networking website both onstage and online, Continuous city serves as the example of a multimedia architecture that mingles the real, the virtual and the imaginary, on one hand, the global and the local, on the other. The “online staging” of the real website http://xubu.cc/ becomes part of the “digital theatre onstage” as people’s recordings get incorporated in the plot, while a third “virtual theatre” emerges though Deb’s blog http://continuouscity.blogspot.com, a chronicle of cities, one blending into the next. By analysing the Continuous City case, I am not only insinuating that home is travel and travel is home, but also questioning navigation and orientation in such a no man’s land of technologically constituted Kul-TourRealities.
Donna J. Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, p. 128.
These thoughts were the stimulus for this paper’s effort to treat the notions of ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ through the controversial points of view, emerged among the feminist writings of the 1970s, the historians and psychoanalysts of the 1980s.While post-stucturalists like J. Butler are passing from gender denaturalization to the undoing of gender, brain scientists speak about a potential underestimation of innate biology at its equation with the anatomical sex; hormones and neurochemicals, constantly changing the brain state, not taken into account. ‘Gender’ constitutes in this sense the key term that is being posed and reposed, thought and rethought, done and undone. My paper will be thus divided into three parts that shall refer to a critical vision of gender categories in various discursive domains.
First part will treat the intrinsic introduction of gender as notion during the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to contest the naturalisation of the bipartite sex difference of men from women, male from female, in multiple arenas of struggle. Despite having passed from the ‘biological’ (sexual difference) to the ‘ontological determinism’ (desire) through the ‘social constructivism’ (power), the notion of “gender” remains trapped within the oppressive Western binarism culture/nature, and therefore the second part will explore the new ways of thinking gender that emerge in the 1990s towards a deconstruction or denaturalisation of this notion; that is, gender as representation and as subjective identity. Although Butler’s theory of performativity did succeed not only to disqualify normative analytical categories leading to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to release both genders and their social frame of reference from any determinism, the third part will not only show in what extent this very notion of gender (as doing) is nowadays again in crisis but also inquire the possible explanations for the impoverishment of gender and therefore for the necessity of its undoing. A mysterious elsewhere will emerge as a sort of agency that motivates us and establishes our sexuality, whose full meaning we ignore. The innate neurochemical biology of Brizendine will thus broaden up the cognitive fields and open new perspectives of rethinking gender, the mysterious elsewhere and -why not?- biology itself.
"