IMAGINING SPACES / PLACES: An international interdisciplinary conference

24−26 August 2011, University of Helsinki, Finland

“You are not in a place; the place is in you” (Angelus Silesius)

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.

Sessions and suggestions of possible approaches:

LANDSCAPES

• landscapes as medium for political, religious, psychological themes
• landscape as pictures vs. (nature) as process
• man in landscape; space, place, genius loci as objective places or subjective experiences
• borderlines between nature and culture/cultural landscape and wilderness

CITYSCAPES

• urban spaces and urban people
• city images and chronotopes
• the idea of metropolis
• gendered/utopist/political/public/private city

MINDSCAPES

• invisible cities and erewhons: fantasies of places and spaces and their role in arts
• allegories of mind
• dreams and other alternatives to actual world(s)

BODYSCAPES

• bodies and belongings
• affective, material, represented bodies
• postcolonial corporealities
• bodies of knowledge

MEMORYSCAPES

• sites of mediations of past, present, future
• methods of memorializations: regimes, archives, museums
• collective memory (nation and nation building) /private memory
• missing past, negative heritage (palimpsest traditions), melancholia

Deadline for abstracts: March 15, 2011.

Go to abstract submission.

via CFP – Imagining Spaces & Places.