LACE #1: Topographies of Touch

LACE #1: Topographies of Touch

July 17-23, 2023

Residency and Symposium

residency hosts: Defne Erdur + Anouk Llaurens, Julien Bruneau, Eva Maes

panel moderators: Efva Lilja + Katy Dymoke + Mayfield Brooks + Deirdre Morris

online moderators: val smith + Laura Ríos

opening ceremony: Eszter Gál, Peter Pleyer

panelists: Alex Bailey, Gabriella Zeno, Amaara Raheem, Lucie Strecker, Nikolaus Gansterer, Peter Kozel, Eva Meyer-Keller, Jeroen Peeters, Vera Tussing, Eszter Gál, Anya Cloud, Makisig Akin, Ismael Huston-Jones

deep dive hosts: Alex Bailey, Klaas Devos, Susan Sentler, Glenna Batson, Angela Schubot, Shelley Etkin

curatorial team: Deirdre Morris, pavleheidler, Sylvia Scheidl, & Dilek Üstünalan

general description

Lace#1: Topographies of Touch is bringing together experts working at the intersection of art, academia and activism to examine the challenge of place, the restriction of its specificity and to explore strategies for successful interpersonal cross-cultural contact-making in the age of gentrification, polarisation and segregation.

Lace#1 will provide distinctive formats curated and hosted for and by practitioners.

Topography, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, brings together the origin words topo– that comes from the Ancient Greek for place and graphy– commonly associated with writing. Unlike choreography, however, where -graphy has traditionally been associated with writing, in sciences like geography, -graphy is what designates this particular science as descriptive. Topography, then, can be understood as the science of describing, naming and acknowledging place in its situatedness, its specificity, in its present and its history.

When described, named and acknowledged, the abstract – situatedness, specificity, present and history – becomes sensed, felt. It becomes the experience of colour, of tone and texture; it becomes a source of wisdom and evidence of knowledge. This activity evidences the importance and value of considering place for any (critical) study to succeed.

Topographies of Touch is imagined as a collection of events, each of which functions as a metaphorical place where touch can be examined in its context-specific capacities. The range of contexts we chose to examine this year encompasses a variety of scales: human-to-human, human-to-practice, human-to-institution and human-to-non-human.

When examined within a variety of contexts in a short period of time by a variety of human and non-human subjects, what about touch will become evident? What about touch, in other words, will we be able to learn only when we accept this simple suggestion: that each of our experience of touch is specific and that each of our experiences of touch is specific for a reason.

Language of communication is English.

Curated by pavleheidler and Deirdre Morris