2024.07.27 Saturday 19:30
Location
GNS,6F K11, No.300 Huaihai Middle Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai
Speaker: Xi Lei
The lecture began with the short story Reading Ouroborian. In this media fable, I imagine a language originating in the desert called Ouroborian. Reading Ouroborian, inscribed on glass as a transparent medium, is like swimming on the surface of the sea of meaning. Through this story, I aim to reveal that amphibious qualities are embedded even in the most arid places.
The separation between land and water is a variant of the nature–culture divide, which is one of the main contemporary manifestations of land-centrism. In the lecture, I use amphibious thinking as a guide to go beyond the separation between land and water, navigating through artistic research, media studies, cultural studies, and glaciology, demonstrating that we can still encounter amphibious potential within today’s geographic hierarchies.
Artist and researcher. He explores how art can be inspired by local knowledge and technics to provide new directions for rethinking ecological consciousness. His work is often presented as artistic research projects that are interdisciplinary (cultural studies, media studies, heritage studies, anthropology and environmental humanities, etc.) and transmedial (video, animation, sound, text, installation, painting, etc.). In these projects, theory and artistic practice are always dynamically intertwined.
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
