[spectre] CONF: Aquatic complexities (Munich, 11-12 Sep 24)

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Hanni Geiger
Date: Sep 3, 2024
Subject: CONF: Aquatic complexities (Munich, 11-12 Sep 24)

Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, LMU Munich, Sep 
11–12, 2024
Registration deadline: Sep 9, 2024

Aquatic complexities. Tourism, aesthetics and dis:connections.

Commercial tourism brochures and posters paint a connective picture of 
holiday destinations. Images adorned with sun, beaches and the turquoise 
sea attract millions of travellers annually and fuel cultural exchange, 
the connection of remote places and job creation. This workshop will 
concentrate on commercial and non-commercial visual arts that reflect 
the tensions between water, the sea, rain — referents of the Latin aqua 
— and tourism. When dealing with water as the most important resource of 
tourism, whether fresh or salty, in natural or artificial basins, these 
works relate to complexities such as interruptions, pauses, frictions 
and absences that always go along with the connections that water-based 
tourism promotes.

This workshop welcomes thinkers and practitioners from art, design and 
architecture (history and theory), cultural and literary studies to 
discuss the many ways in which aesthetic creations and designed 
environments surrounding water-based tourism visually comment, mediate 
and influence global dis:connections – past, present and future. 
Historical and contemporary visual works that treat water as an image, a 
material, medium, means, environment and eco-system can illuminate the 
ubiquitous but overshadowed interdependencies of global entanglements 
and disentanglements in tourism. The works reinterrogate the sensorial 
aspects of leisure design and the connections it generates between the 
mediated destinations and the consumers with regard to water-related 
dis:connections.

The workshop covers a wide range of aquatic complexities: we consider 
the rising sea level and the disappearance of many destinations, 
environments and cultures; infrastructures and tourist gazes that both 
connect and disconnect destinations and visitors; the glocal design of 
maritime architectures and bodies; ecological devastations due to the 
over-exploitation of water in tourism; islands, beaches, hotels and 
pools as sites of (im)mobility, social inclusion and exclusion, and of 
conflicts between local communities and global power structures.

By theorising on aquatic complexities as visualised in manifold 
aesthetic practices, genres and methods, this event fosters alternative 
ways to approach globalisation from the perspectives of the humanities 
and the arts while contributing to non-hegemonic art history.

PROGRAMME:

Wednesday, 11 September 2024

16:30    Welcome and introduction
DESIGN TALK
17:00    Ivica Mitrović (Arts Academy, University of Split): Adriatic: 
notes for the future Followed by a discussion moderated by Julian 
Stalter    18:30    Dinner         Thursday, 12 September 2024

MARITIME INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE TOURIST GAZE
Chair: Valeska Huber
9:00    Jonathan Stafford (The Leibnitz-Center for Literary and Cultural 
Research, ZfL, Berlin): Democratising the sublime: spectacular danger 
and the rise of mass leisure by the sea
9:45    Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf): 
‘Venice is threatened every year with a new transportation device’. 
Visual histories and infrastructures of mobility in Venice
10:30    Coffee break

WATER, DESIGN AND ‘GLOCALITY’
Chair: Hanni Geiger
11:00    Panayiota Pyla (University of Cyprus): Hotel waterscapes: the 
aesthetics, economics and politics of pools and beaches in Cyprus
11:45    Chelsea Haines (Arizona State University): Redrawing the 
Mediterranean: Dora Gad’s yam tikhoniut
12:30      Lunch

GENDER, LEISURE AND MIGRATION Chair: Anna Messner
14:00    Hanna Büdenbender (Saarland University): Female body and the 
sea: representations of mermaids and South Sea maidens between the local 
and the global
14:45    Burcu Dogramaci (global dis:connect / LMU Munich): Valeska 
Gert's Ziegenstall on Sylt Island: transatlantic exile and a cabaret bar 
as a place of return 15:30    Coffee break

ARTIST TALK – IN CONVERSATION
Chair: Boris Čučković Berger
16:00    Hanni Geiger (global dis:connect): On leisure and limbo. 
Adriatic nodes of tourism and migration Artist response by Ilir Tsouko 
(Berlin/Tirana/Athens/Priština) Discussion
17:15    Concluding remarks

Concept and organisation: Hanni Geiger, Käte Hamburger Research Centre 
global dis:connect, Munich.

You can download the flyer and register here: 
https://www.globaldisconnect.org/03/13/11-12-september-aquatic-complexities-tourism-aesthetics-and-disconnections/

Reference / Quellennachweis:
CONF: Aquatic complexities (Munich, 11-12 Sep 24). In: ArtHist.net, Sep 
3, 2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/42477>.