Performative seminar

Prefiguring the Museum of the Invisible.

Incorporations is a one-day performative seminar jointly organized by the Museum of the Invisible, the University Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Monday, June 17, 2013.

With such diverse speakers as artists, philosophers, and scientists, this seminar aims to question modes of thinking and creating in a world where the definition of what is human is constantly shifting. This will be achieved among other ways through borderline artistic experiments which reintroduce the idea of inspiration or the vision in order to redefine the artist as a mediator between visible and invisible realms.

Phenomena of the incorporation or ingestion of non-human bodies into the human body are often considered autonomous and odd by society, science and contemporary technology. But how should a body that gives itself up to a shamanic experience be defined today, or to performative ritualization, to animality, or even to non-human biology to the point of forgetting its known limits?

By turns understood as an anatomical body, a body-machine, an electric body, an evolutionist body, even a mutant body or a prosthetic body by science and the history of its representation, is it not possible to establish a new definition of the body as porous, through the interdisciplinary study of incorporations experienced by artists, therapists or shamans?

The focus of this session is to address and reveal such experiences of integrating something foreign into the flesh, in particular in the context of contemporary rituals in art and performance.

What would be the corresponding phenomenon of intrusion these states refer to in the world of ethnography? Who or what is involved?

Participating artists: Art Orienté Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin, University Paris 1), Myriam Mechita (artist, Fr), Camille Renarhd (choreographer, Ca), Pascale Weber (artist, MCF University Paris 1).

Speakers and other contributors: Manuela de Barros (art theorist, MCF University Paris 8), Jean-Marie Brôhm (sociologist, professor the University of Montpellier), Pierre Cassou-Noguès (philosopher, Pr. University Paris 8), Graham Harvey (anthropologist, Open University Milton, GB), Marion Laval-Jeantet (artist and ethnologist, MCF University Paris 1), Dominique Lestel (philosopher, Pr. Ecole Normale Supérieure), Pascal Pique (art historian, director of the Museum of the Invisible), and Corine Sombrun (composer, writer).

The seminar component was conceived within a joint multidisciplinary investigation bringing together the arts, sciences, and technology around artistic performance, by Marion Laval-Jeantet (UMR Acte – Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Dominique Lestel (École Scientifique de l’ENS- Archives Husserl) in collaboration with Pascal Pique (Museum of the Invisible). The seminar will continue the research begun during the Overwhelmed Human session in December 2012.

The Museum of the Invisible, created by Pascal Pique (former director of contemporary art and the funding program Frac in the Midi-Pyrénées region at the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse), is a new center for creation and research dedicated to the relationship between art and the many forms of the invisible. From astrophysics to the social sciences and alternative sources of knowledge; and spanning the study of natural phenomena of visionary and spiritual dimensions. This day-long program at the Palais de Tokyo will inaugurate a cycle of events running until June 2014 dedicated to prefiguring the Museum of the Invisible.