Agenda

26 May 2026 14:00

Un/useful Art (AKA Il desiderio di essere inutile). The limits of participation in art and anthropol

Aula Biral

Un/useful Art (AKA Il desiderio di essere inutile). The limits of participation in art and anthropology

26 May 2026

Malcanton Marcorà, Aula Biral, 
Dorsoduro 3484/D, Calle Contarini, Venezia

Roger Sansi Roca
Universitat de Barcelona

In this presentation I will discuss my work on the relationship between art and anthropology, focusing in particular on questions of participation, collaboration and curation. One of the central points of the presentation is to move beyond an utilitarian approach to art and anthropology as disciplines, and how one can be "useful" to another. My central point is that at the core of both art and anthropology lies a radically anti-utilitarian ethos that makes it difficult to instrumentalize them as useful methodologies that can be easily justified in academic reports. That is paradoxically, the attractiveness and the difficulty of these exchanges. The question of agency- who is in charge of the process and what is the objective is central to participatory practices; but art practice and ethnographic fieldwork paradoxically insist on open processes where agency is withdrawn and have no fixed outcome. To better understand these processes we will compare them with STS discussions on the actor-network, the assemblage and symbiosis.

Organized by: DFBC, HealthXCross project P.I. Roberta Raffaetà (ERC GA n. 949742 HealthXCross)

Language

The event will be held in English

Organized by

NICHE, DFBC

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