The First International Conference ON THE MARGIN brings an opportunity to discuss the margin from the centre - whether it coincides with study themes and subjects, ontological and epistemological positions, or research methodologies themselves. Marginality, eccentricity, liminality, and superfluity are all part of a dynamic relationship between centre and margin(s) that we hope to approach and discuss, inviting researchers of all fields somewhat connected with image, art, and artistic phenomena.

For disciplines related to Art and Humanities, as for Art as an active, creative process, margins are no longer a place of misfit, nor marginality a condition of exclusion. They have become, in fact, part of the central concerns of a wide range of researchers, thinkers and artists, sometimes far beyond the reach of academies.

Thus, researchers from a wide range of study fields have been opening their work to all sorts of themes previously, and sometimes tacitly, assumed as secondary or superfluous, aspiring to grasp transgression and paradox, the monstrous and the anomaly, the hybrid and the undefined, the minorities and the corresponding dynamics of exclusion and inclusion. Nevertheless, this operative, theoretical and methodological centralisation of margins, has commonly been encapsulated inside the scope of each academic discipline and cultural realm, compromising dialogue, exchange, connection and friction: mandatory conditions to a sound understanding of the most remote and controversial areas of artistic creation, in its multilayered nature.

This much needed dialogue, along with the urge to grasp the margins from (still) another point of view, is at the heart of the first Conference ON THE MARGIN, which strives to open the debate on margins precisely from the centre. Not the centre as stage for an artificial, uprooted performance of the margin, but as a physical, symbolical, ideological space of its actual infiltration - or even as a potentially marginal space. Since the margin spreads wherever it finds a gap, the challenge is to find it at the centre, through fissures, migrations, appropriations, inversions, dialogues, and usurpations.

With the artistic phenomenon, its multiple demeanours and behaviours, resonances and dilutions, as a common ground, the Centre as Margin will hopefully be a comprehensive and multidisciplinary discussion platform, encouraging the dialogue between different disciplines, on all time-frames, provided with the interest to deal with the complex nature of the (inter)relationship between centre and margin. One of the main (and manifold) goals of this conference is thus to search for the parallels, the intersections, the specificities, and even the incongruities (whether methodological, theoretical, symbolical, etc) between different approaches, both to the edge and on the edge. A second, long term goal, is to test the limits and avail of these different pathways and approaches: from the centre, from the margin, from the border between them or from its very absence.

This international and interdisciplinary conference, draws on art and image to further explore the marginal potential of the centre, whether as a representational space, a main theme, subject or narrative, a figure, character or behaviour, or as a theoretical and methodological approach. We welcome thus all participants and contributions that relate, directly or peripherally, with the artistic phenomenon, in all its historical times, up to the present.

The topics suggested for proposed papers, which do not exclude marginal proposals to these themes and questions, are the following:

Inquiring (on) the edge: theoretical and methodological approaches
The margin at the centre, or the centre as margin: processes, themes, subjects, characters
The limits of Art: interart relations, art and image, ergon and parergon
Transgression and Paradox: (im)possibilities
Monstrum monstrat: monstrosity, the limits of the human, and the eloquence of ontological indeterminacy

A place for the margin: real, operative, and symbolical spaces

Please send abstracts of no more than 400 words (20 min. presentation) and a short biographical note (300 words) to coloquioamargemgmail.com no later than March 5, 2017. Abstracts and papers may be presented in Portuguese, Spanish, English and French.

All participants will be notified by the end of March, with the immediate communication of the definite programme.