Cette activté se déroule en anglais.

(Re)Imagining the Social. 
A day of talks on social imaginaries
curated by Danae Theodoridou.

In their Speculative Everything (2013), Dunne and Raby argue that a series of key changes in the world after the 1970s (fall of the Berlin wall, atomization of society etc) made it much harder for us today to imagine social and political alternatives. Anything that does not fit the demands of capitalism is now dismissed as fantasy or unreal. According to the two authors, our dreams have downgraded to hopes, whereas the creation of new visions seems more and more unlikely.

In the frame of her three-year-long artistic research on social imaginaries, the performance maker and researcher Danae Theodoridou invites Feiko Beckers (visual artist, NL/BE), Guy Königstein (visual artist, IL/NL) and Rudi Laermans (KU Leuven, BE) in a series of roundtable discussions on the way we imagine our social coexistence and the way art can contribute to the emergence
of social imaginaries in the 21^st century. Departing from specific ideas that have been influential to the maker’s research, the invited guests share their thoughts and suggestions in short statements, which are used as starting points for an open discussion with the audience. The evening closes with the presentation of Something Dreamy, a performance lecture on social imaginaries created in the frame of Theodoridou’s research, which is followed by a discussion moderated by dramaturg and performance theorist Jonas Rutgeerts (BE).

Schedule :
12:00-13:30 In conversation with Guy Königstein (visual artist, IL/NL)
13:30-15:00 In conversation with Rudi Laermans (KU Leuven, BE)
15:00-16:30 In conversation with Feiko Beckers (visual artist, NL/BE)
16:30-17:00 Break
17:00-18:30 Something Dreamy, performance lecture followed by a discussion moderated by Jonas Rutgeerts. 

Feiko Beckers is a Dutch visual artist, working with video, performance, installation and text. He graduated from Academie Minerva in Groningen in 2006 and in 2011-2012 he was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2013 he was an artist in residence at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France. In his work, Beckers both recounts and stages personal stories with the participation of actual members of his family and friends. These stories often revolve around personal failures, accidents and embarrassments he once experienced. His work is an attempt to find answers to the unexpected and relentless nature of these unfortunate events. Thereby he either creates existential solutions for the most trivial of problems or trivial answers for life’s bigger questions. 
http://www.feikobeckers.com

Confused in a world abundant of conflicts, discrepancies, paradoxes and their constantly competing representations, Guy Königstein interacts aesthetically with his environment: he manipulates political narratives, translates personal memories into visual objects, creates tools for speculative engagement with the present, cooks provocative dishes, excavates future archaeological findings, publishes silent manifests, and performs flexible biographies and practices. Privileged to shift between fact and fiction, between soft and hard media, between the stage and the plinth, between the online and the offline, between himself and his image, Königstein is thankful. 
http://www.guykoenigstein.com

Rudi Laermans is Senior Professor of Social Theory at the Faculty of Social Sciences at KU Leuven. Between 1992 and 2006 he was in charge of the Centre for Sociology of Culture and supervised several research projects in Flanders in the fields of visual arts, cultural heritage, cultural policy and the attendance of the performing arts. Since it was established in 1995, Laermans was also involved in the theoretical programme of P.A.R.T.S. and he has been a guest lecturer at many other art schools abroad. He has published numerous essays and several books, nationally and internationally, on social and cultural theory, cultural policy and participation, contemporary dance and visual arts. He often deploys a sociological perspective, but just as often advances a wider view inspired by contemporary philosophy and political theory. His most recent book is Moving Together. Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance(2015).

Jonas Rutgeerts is a dramaturg and performance theorist. He studied Philosophy (KU Leuven) and Dramaturgy (University of Amsterdam) and is currently working on a PhD on choreography and philosophy (KU Leuven). His main research interests involve : choreographic processes, social choreographies and the relation between movement and politics.
As a dramaturg and researcher he collaborates among others with Labo21, Ivana Müller, David Weber-Krebs, Sanja Mitrovic, ICKAmsterdam and Clément Layes. He is the author of Re-act : Over re-enactment in de hedendaagse dans (2015).

Danae Theodoridou is a performance maker and researcher based in Brussels. She studied literature and linguistics in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and acting in the National Theatre of Northern Greece. She completed her practice-led PhD at Roehampton University in London. The last three years her artistic work focuses on the notion of social imaginaries. In this frame, she created One Small Step for a Man : Hello, Goodbye (2015), Earth in 100 Years (2016) and Something Dreamy (2016). In 2017 she continues this research with the support of the Flemish community. At the same time, Danae teaches in various university departments and art conservatoires of theatre and dance in Europe, curates practice-led research projects and publishes her research work internationally. She has been the co-creator of Dramaturgy at Work (2013-2016) and the co-author of The Practice of Dramaturgy : Working on Actions in Performance (Valiz, 2017). 

This event is supported by La Bellone and the Flemish community.