Exploring narratives of belonging and artistic re-imaginations of the public space

Panel convenors:
Dr. Basia Sliwinska (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and Dr. Maria Photiou (University of Derby)

Multiple stories of home-ings, being uprooted and re-grounded, bring up ongoing issues of rights, whether bodily, land rights or citizenship. The politics of belonging, often affiliated with the politics of 'othering', has been used to strip bodies of their rights, force them to leave, expel or curtail access to or from spaces. Building an alternative society, as argued by Silvia Federici in Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018), requires cooperative thinking and making, and acknowledging the entanglements between the personal and the political, political activism and reproduction of everyday life. This panel interrogates how commoning and collectivising enable us to re-imagine the public space. It invites contributions that examine the work of contemporary women artists who via their practice explore how the reorganisation of home-ing practices can offer spaces with/in which belonging is equal. How is politics of togetherness activated via artistic practices to support rights for all bodies? Women artists’ reconceptions of space can offer new understandings of seeing and experiencing the public space, becoming, as Marsha Meskimmon in Engendering the City: Women Artist and the Urban Space (1997) explains, ‘sentient participants in the city’ who negotiate the triangulation of gender, space and representation.

If you are interested in presenting a paper at this session, please submit an abstract (max. 200 words) and a CV with list of relevant key publications or portfolio (max. 2 pages) by 12 July 2022.

Please email your abstract and CV to bsliwinskafcsh.unl.pt and M.Photiouderby.ac.uk

The panel session will be submitted for consideration at the NIAS Conference 2023 Belonging & Mobility, which will be held from 19 to 21 April 2023 in Amsterdam.
Link to the Conference: https://nias.knaw.nl/events/niasconference/