Cultuurhaven: Shock Value?

A hands-On Symposium on Contemporary Modernism Across Literature, Art, Sound, Movement, and Scholarship

Shock Value?

A hands-On Symposium on Contemporary Modernism Across Literature, Art, Sound, Movement, and Scholarship. With Jade French, Meindert Peters, Mia You, Thalia Ostendorf, Anneloek Scholten, and Chris Flinterman.

Three creative-critical workshops and an evening programme exploring the contemporary legacies, inheritances, and contestations of historical modernism.

It’s a story familiar to many: artists, writers, and intellectuals a century ago abandoned conservative norms and ideals about form, representation, and technique to develop shockingly new aesthetic approaches. Modernist movements like Dada, Futurism, the New Negro, and Surrealism emerged in response to rapid changes of Modernity: migration and displacement, fascism, imperialism, racism and eugenics, economic crises, war, global pandemics, rights and emancipation movements, revolutions, new labour relations, new media technologies, and new social identities. But, where does that leave artists, writers, and intellectuals today?

A century on, there is a growing trend for explicitly revisiting modernist histories and techniques, often in direct response to the social and political instability of the past decade. While neofascist groups in Italy and the USA are memorialising the modernist era for its extremist populist politics, many authors and scholars are challenging the many gaps in and erased voices of the institutionalised archive of modernism.How is our idea of what modernism was, including its more troublesome, challenging, or contradictory aspects, shaped by contemporary social and political formations, and vice versa? How are scholarly and artistic agents working together to reevaluate - or caught in a feedback loop repeating - the legacy of literary and cultural modernism today? And what kinds of creative-critical interventions can we design, adapt, or practice as interventions in the distant, reified, institutionalised archives of modernism?

This event explores how modernist strategies and techniques such as collage can serve as a method of thinking historically and critically by layering past and present to examine how modernist aesthetics, ideologies, and resistances resonate or clash with contemporary cultural and political formations.

Workshop program

12:00-12:15 Welcome
12:15-14:00 Workshop 1 (Alphabetum) Cut-Up Manifestos: A dadaist collage workshop led by researcher and co-curator of the radical craft collective Decorating Dissidence Jade French (University of Loughborough)
14:00-14:15 - Break
14:15-16:00 Workshop 2 (Auditorium)Becoming Outrageous: an avant-garde movement workshop led by researcher and dancer Meindert Peters (University of Oxford)
16:00-16:15 Break
16:15- 18:00 Workshop 3 (Alphabetum)Fictive Unfixings: a translingual poetry workshop led by researcher and poet Mia You (Utrecht University)

Evening program

18:30-19:15 Welcome with free soup and informal encounters
19:15-20:00 Panel discussion: Modernist Pasts, Neomodernist Futures?
This panel brings together researchers and practitioners working on the myriad contemporary revisions, rewritings, and reworkings of literary modernism across languages and media. Featuring Jade French (University of Loughborough and Decorating Dissidence), Meindert Peters (University of Oxford), Mia You (Utrecht University), Anneloek Scholten (Utrecht University), Thalia Ostendorf (University of Amsterdam), and Chris Flinterman (University of Groningen). The panel will be chaired by Ruth Alison Clemens (Leiden University).
20:00-20:30 Refreshments
20:30-21:15 Listening to the Modernist Machine: an audiovisual performance led by artistic researcher Sandipan Nath (KABK)
21:15 Close, further festivities

The event is free but registration for the workshops is mandatory. The evening programme is open to all but registration is recommended.

This event is part of the research project ‘Neomodernisms: Networking Modernist Memory between contemporary scholarship and literature’ at Leiden University. Organized by: Ruth Alison Clemens, postdoctoral researcher Clarice Carvalho Alphen, student assistant Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS)Supported by: Cultuurhaven at West Den Haag, host of the Free Thursday Night programme The donors of the Leiden University Fund and the Stichting Elise Mathilde Fonds, www.luf.nl.