The following project pages are part of the core project "Tension/Spannung" at the BERLIN INSTITUTE FOR CULTURAL INQUIRY.
		UN-TITLED Affirming Negations - Negating Affirmations   Conference at the ICI Berlin 1-3 July 2010 How can we speak of non-being if to speak at all implies saying “some thing”? Would we not thereby impart being to the object of our utterance and thus contradict the very claim of our assertion? This linguistic and ontological difficulty raises the broader question of the nature of negation as a rhetorical, logical and political act. Negation cannot simply be opposed to or absolutely independent from affirmation but must instead be intertwined with positivity, since negation always involves a thing which is negated. But this can be called into question by ... (more)   DISENCHANTMENT Virtual Exhibition by Lissette Olivares People from around the world migrate to the “First World” in the hopes of finding a better life. For many however, living and surviving in the “First World” poses a set of new struggles, including (but not limited to): learning a new language, legal difficulties, the separation of families and friendships, labor discrimination, exploitation, and racism. For artists who grow up or live in the “First World,” ... (more)     METAMORPHOSING DANTE Conference at the ICI Berlin 24-26 September 2009 After almost seven centuries, Dante persists and even seems to haunt the present. Dante has been used, rewritten, and metamorphosed through manifold media and cultural productions; the image itself of Dante has provided many paradigms for being (or performing the role of) a poet, indiscriminately shifting from the civic to the love poet, from the language experimenter to the engaged poet-philosopher, or from the bard of a ‘sublime’ Inferno to that of heavenly rarefaction. This conference will... (more)     VERSUS LABORATORY Plus/Minus, or on Subtraction and Excess at the Edges and the Centres of Philosophy Versus Laboratory, a research project initiated by Bruno Besana and Ozren Pupovac, is a theoretical laboratory set to explore, and experiment upon the problem of the polemical genesis of thought in contemporary philosophy. Our inquiry is twofold. On the one hand, we want to understand how philosophy shapes its interiority – the production of concepts – through the capture but also the conflictual interference of political, aesthetical, and more widely extraphilosophical acts and discourses. On the other hand... (more)     PHANTASMATA Techniques of the Uncanny - Workshop ICI Berlin 6-8 April 2009 The concept of the ‘uncanny’ is one of the most floating in contemporary aesthetics. The ‘uncanny’ delineates a strange proximity between the known and the unknown, either as something familiar presenting itself under an extraneous shape, or as something extraneous revealing an element of familiarity in its features. Structurally close to other experiences... (more)     DANTE'S PLURILINGUALISM Conference at the ICI Berlin 2-4 April 2009 Already in 1929 Erich Auerbach highlighted the innovative character of Dante's oeuvre which, in contrast with its traditional interpretation as the culmination and summa of a medieval Weltanschauung, he associated with a modern representation of the human being in its individuality and historical reality. This conference invites scholars from different disciplines... (more)