UBC’s Transformative Memory Symposium is now accepting submissions for, “Resilient Cartographies: Everyday strategies of social justice that (re)emerged during pandemic times”. Students are encouraged to participate in the symposium by submitting projects that reflect the topics below. This is a multidisciplinary invitation to express your reflections on the themes through different forms; gestures, performances, artworks, sounds, and written work.
This symposium explores the contingent, emergent, resilient, gestures of care that have emerged during global pandemic times, and illuminates their entanglements with memory and art practices. While sociopolitical and economic ruptures have no doubt devastated many, we also have witnessed how communities have galvanized grassroots efforts to care for communities, while also fomenting shifts towards social justice. This symposium invites guests to contend with the everyday collective strategies of care as hybrid and interrelational spaces where experiential and transgenerational knowledge condense with the urgency and the creativity to imagine and generate diverse formats to cope, confront, or transform the ongoing precarization of life as well as rethink and shape possible futures.
The symposium interrogates the conditions that place art, memory, and care to the private and consanguinity sphere, leaving the work of memory to the past, and relegating the social practice of facilitating community care as an illegible, non-artistic practice. Through contending with these intersections, we explore the transformative potential of collective strategies of care.
How have art and cultural initiatives that have emerged through strategies of care, been enacted by communities during the pandemic? What everyday care acts can be made visible through arts practice? How have structural and historic senses and orders been disrupted through collective strategies of care?
We will curate on a website a series of gestures, and traces of collective care that have emerged during the pandemic. The virtual symposium will be structured around this digital, symbolic cartography that will be available online. We invite participants to join us on a one-day symposium of panels about everyday strategies of care that offer important questions, strategies, and tools regarding social justice during COVID. We explore how different initiatives have organized and cultivated collective, creative, and sensitive ways that enable communities to survive or live more liveable lives.
Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2022
For more information please contact: ubcsocialjusticegsa@gmail.com,
www.transformativememory.ubc.ca/2022-art-memory-justice-symposium/
