Drumming order

The conference paper will look at the Francis Alys work ‘Railings’ 2004 to consider how Alys’ initiation of a bodily and acoustic relation to space can be understood as an effort toward a spatial appropriation of those surroundings. Bernice Donszelmann argues that the effect of Alys’ gestural and acoustic intervention is to produce on a micro-level a reorientation of the exterior architectural wall back toward the civic space of the city, making it face rather than rebuff Alys as the urban user of that space.

Literature and art mediate our experiences of the spaces and places surrounding us as well as within us. In contemporary discussion we use, besides the old term ‘landscape’, other ‘scapes’ which reflect a new interest and new thinking with regard to spaces: we speak of cityscapes, bodyscapes, mindscapes and even memoryscapes, and their relationships to one another. The intertwining of what, of old, was called ‘macrocosm’ (nature and society) and ‘microcosm’ (body and mind) and the role various art forms and media play in articulating and negotiating these chiasmic encounters is the focal point of the Imagining spaces/places conference. How are the interfaces between ‘the place in you and you in the place’ depicted? How are these imagined and material landscapes gendered and sexualized?

The conference seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history, literature and gender studies. We welcome papers addressing issues of representing and creating spaces in literature, art or film, and emphasizing the gendered, emotional and political or ideological character of these cultural mediations and re-mediations.

The conference is organized by the Finnish Doctoral Programme in Art History, the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies and the Finnish Research School in Women’s and Gender Studies.