NAVIGATING TURBULENCES

CCC PUBLIC SEMINAR

HEAD, Boulevard Helvtique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor
Navigating Turbulences names the Public Seminar 2016/17 that is organised by the
CCC Research Master Program of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genve.
More a frame than a theme, Navigating Turbulences proposes to continue to think
together about the need for new vocabularies for living in global turbulences by means
of contemporary research processes. Each session will introduce a particular
approach for understanding and undertaking research as a practice in the arts.
The condition of turbulences creates a situation in which knowledge and nonknowledge exist together. In a condition of turbulence, on one side, we can rely on
knowledge about science, history, rituals, regulations and systems that seem to
secure our place in the world. On the other side, the moment of turbulence carries the
condition of non-knowledge , in which it is not clear exactly what will happen next:
language is missing, borders are closed, translation is needed, the mind is closer to
the body, control mechanisms and systems fail, dominant histories unravel and
collaborative thinking is important. It is a moment of a relational uncertainty that holds
the potential to open up a new horizon.
How can we move in times of turbulences? Navigating from inside a condition of
turbulences begins by rendering precisely the problem of localization in continuous
interaction with geopolitical global entanglements. This, in itself, is nothing new. These
entanglements have long histories and privilege certain positionalities, reason enough
to articulate precisely our position in relation to the world: We may think here about
global trade-routes, contemporary trajectories of sea migration, the abstract flows of
financial capitalism, weaponized image-technologies, the algorithmic architectures of
planetary computation, the uneven geographies of knowledge, the politics of
translation, and so on. Who are we in such a stack of layers?
The public seminar Navigating Turbulences (English/French) builds upon the CCCCurriculum with its faculty members teaching Research Practice, Situated Art
Practices, Critical Studies, the Curatorial, Political Studies and Theory Fiction.
Moreover, the public seminar will also contain sessions on the institutionalisation of
lifelong learning; this reflects the current expansion of practice-led PhDs in art
academy contexts and resonates with the newly established CCC PhD-Forum with
guests.
Fall Term 2016
Monday, October 10, 7pm, Research Practice with Samia Henni
Monday, October 31, 7pm, Political Studies with Pierre Hazan

Wednesday, November 16, 7pm POOL.CH with Charles Heller and Susan Schuppli
Wednesday, November 30, 7pm, Theory Fiction with Kodwo Eshun
Thursday, December 15, 7pm, PhD-Forum with Andrea Phillips
Monday, January 16, 7pm, Critical Studies with Gene Ray
Navigating Turbulences continues in the Spring Term 2017: The Curatorial with Doreen
Mende and Situated Art Practices with Anne-Julie Raccoursier, among others.
Curriculum-related cooperations take place with Vera Tollmann of the Research
Center for Proxy Politics as well as Tom Holert and Volker Pantenburg of the Harun
Farocki Institut.
The CCC Research Master Program is one of three Master Programs of the
Department of Visual Arts at the Haute dcole dart et design, HEAD Genve. The
CCC Master engages with the work on research methodologies to articulate
processes, collaborations and projects with the objective to encourage students to
initiate new vocabularies for being in the world in the 21st century. The letter C stands
for critical, curatorial, cybernetic studies and opens towards horizons of conceptual,
constellational, colonial, computational, compositional, cross-cultural, conversational,
communal, cyclonopedic, correlational, cosmic, controversial or confessional
investigations. In the context of a Research-Based Program in the Arts of Higher
Education in Europe, we need to rethink the localizations of knowledge in relation to
our entanglement with geopolitical, post-historical, inhuman and energy
infrastructures through questions such as: Which knowledge? Whose knowledge? For
which purposes? And how do we get there? The Curriculum follows a transdisciplinary
pedagogy informed by artistic thinking and operates through a bi-lingual
(English/French) environment with a transcontinental group of faculty and students.
https://head.hesge.ch/ccc/turbulence/
Head CCC: Doreen Mende
CCC Assistant Researchers: Camilla Paolino and Mlissa Tun Tun.
Contact: ccc.head@hesge.ch