Karen Barad, Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable | lecture
16.06.2017 from 19:00 to 21:00
Lecture,
Castello di Rivoli, Conference Hall
For the first time in Italy, the Castello di Rivoli hosts a conference by the American physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad, one of the most well-known and important figures of international scientific debate. Barad espouses decentering humans and conceiving the world like a series of interactions; she has influenced an entire generation of young artists in the world particularly tied to materiality and immateriality. The event is part of the Abitare il Minerale project.
Karen Barad promotes Agential Realism, a reflection that intertwines quantum physics, ethics, ontology, and epistemology, expanding her research of matter to an attentive and renewed observation of social and political phenomena. By overturning the sense of causality and individuality, Barad introduces the notion of intra-actions, operations that constantly reconfigure matter and establish “the definition of differences, of ‘individual,’ instead of presuming their existence as being independent and antecedent.”
For the conference Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable, Karen Barad will show how deconstruction dynamics of quantum physics can challenge the modern concept of time by presenting new and radical social and environmental imaginaries. The uncertainty of time, at the heart of quantum physics, unsettles “not only research on particle physics and nuclear physics, but also challenges the traditional interpretation of social phenomena like colonialism, capitalism, militarism, racism, nationalism, and environmental destruction.”
Karen Barad (1956), an American physicist and feminist theorist, is a key protagonist of the contemporary debate. She currently teaches Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and the History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She graduated in physics from Stony Brook University in New York, and then published in 2007 Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, a book that, while presenting the theory of Agential Realism, definitively undermines the bases not only of our traditional way of conceiving matter, but also the dichotomies between nature and culture, animal and human, man and woman, problematizing the social role of science and the nature of ethics. Over the years she has received many honors including in 2016 an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University, in Sweden. Since 2016 she has taken part in the project “Decolonizing Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education” at the University of Cape Town. She has also held seminars at prestigious universities and institutions, and participated in 2012 in dOCUMENTA (13) with the text What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice in the catalogue and the series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. Book n° 099, Hatje Cantz Verlag (2012).
Admission to the event is free, but participants are required to register beforehand at abitareilminerale@gmail.com, or in person on the day of the conference at the Castello di Rivoli.
These participants can also take advantage of a reduced-price ticket to the Museum by presenting their e-mail reservation.
Abitare il Minerale is organized by a.titolo in collaboration with the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, curated by Francesca Comisso, Luisa Perlo, and Marianna Vecellio, with funding by the Compagnia di San Paolo and is part of the “Ora! Linguaggi contemporanei, produzioni innovative” competition.
