Pubblicato il: 19/03/2024
University of Milan.

University of Milan.

Temporality and performance are the core themes of the international conference that is taking place on 22 March at the Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage of the University of Milan. The conference is an initiative of Professor of Performing Arts Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, who joined our University thanks to the 2022 ERC Attractiveness Call launched by Fondazione Cariplo. 

Bringing together eminent researchers and emerging scholars from five countries, the conference will explore the relationship between performance and politics. The focus will be on the political implications of the relationship between archives and performance, the role of repertoire in passing down memory, and performative interventions in temporality.

The conference stems from three research projects developed by Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay within his “Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics”, which is part of a larger initiative called Archives of Abjection: Minoritarian Cultural Production in Turkey and Its Diasporas and funded under Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). The three projects, whose shared goal is to analyse cultural production and identity-strengthening policies within minority communities in Turkey and other connected geographical areas, are: Staging National Abjection: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas (funded under the ERC Starting Grant scheme); Archives of Abjection: Minoritarian Cultural Production in Turkey and Its Diasporas (funded by NextGenerationEU and the Italian Ministry of University and Research); Negotiating Abjection: Performance and Politics among Turkey’s Diasporas in Lombardy (funded by Fondazione Cariplo with the ERC Attractiveness grant). 

In addition to the researchers involved in the three projects, the conference boasts three high-calibre speakers such as Bishnupriya Dutt (professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and President of the International Federation for Theatre Research), Milija Gluhovic (professor at the University of Warwick and member of the Executive Committee for the International Federation for Theatre Research) and Olivera Jokic (professor at the John Jay College of the City University of New York). Dutt, Gluhovic and Jokic will respectively chair the following plenary sessions: Abject Bodies Performing and Performed: Protests, Resistances and Solidarities in India; Performing the New Silk Roads: Views from the Ground and Gathering Times: a Post-socialist Rural Pub as a Historical Stage.

Panelists of the afternoon session include Bilal Akar (Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History), Sinibaldo De Rosa (University of Milan), Rüya Kalıntaş (Boğaziçi University and Galatasaray University), Francesco Rossetti (University of Milan), Berkem Yanıkcan (Kadir Has University) and Gamze Tosun (Kadir Has University). 

The flyer of the event is available here below.