Slowly Learning to survive the desire to simplify
Symposium at IASPIS, Stockholm, Sweden. Production Unit 2006
In light of today’s political and cultural climate, there is once again a need to raise questions about how stories are constructed and what effects they have. What are the possibilities and the risks of using art as a way to satisfy a need for »critical documents«? What are the rights and responsibilities of the storyteller? Participants from various fields such as art, film, media criticism and political theory will discuss the structure of narratives and the construction of history. What stories are not given space in today’s society and what alternative strategies exist for the production of images? One of the aims is to discuss the media’s increasingly monopolized representation of reality, and its correlation to the art world’s present interest in the political.
The symposium Slowly Learning to Survive the Desire to Simplify was produced in collaboration with NIFCA and IASPIS. Apart from the symposium in Stockholm, it also consisted of a reader and a screening program shown at different locations such as UKS in Oslo, Circulationscentralen in Malmö, Gallery Box in Göteborg and the Goethe institute in Stockholm. The symposium took place in a installation by Olivia Plender.