Professor Mieke Bal, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, presented video and lecture.
The 18-minute video “Lost in Space” gives shape to what is otherwise barely perceptible: the effort to speak in an Anglicized world. Many people live an international life, and encounter limitations in communication while also feeling liberated by the opening of the world. Who wouldn’t recognize this situation today? The global and the local meet and rub against each other in today’s “glocal” world.
The lecture proposes the video as an entrance into insight in what this implies through aesthetic means: sound and image are no longer in sync; and narratives, visual and otherwise, lead nowhere. No-where, I will argue, is best dealt with by means of a tiny shift: now-here. I will use the video to discuss such issues as language, home, security, and the possibility to improve the quality of the social fabric. The paper is part of the project on the culture of the contemporary “glocal” everyday life.
Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3d edition in press). Mieke Bal is also a video-artist, her experimental documentaries on migration include A Thousand and One Days; Colony and the installation Nothing is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. Her current film project is a “theoretical fiction”, Mère Folle (see crazymothermovie.com)
www.miekebal.org
