Conference “Nonspecific Arts: Notes for an Aesthetics of Survival”

Last Thursday, November 17, at 7:00 p.m., Jens Anderman visited Il Posto Documentos to deliver his lecture «Nonspecific Arts: Notes for an Aesthetics of Survival». In this occasion, the researcher and professor at New York University raised the question of whether art can help us survive the end of the world, highlighting the power of what he calls non-specific arts to face this challenge. 

«…I advocate for hybrid practices that harness the world-making capacity that is inherent to the arts, to provoke acts of gathering that engage existing humans and more-than-humans alike,» Anderman posited in this talk. «Inespecificity, in artistic production today, thus stakes our ability to develop arts and ethics of multispecies coexistence. In Donna Haraway’s words, it represents a path -perhaps the only one we have left- to reweave multispecies histories and practices of becoming-with.»

Jens Andermann is a professor at New York University, with long experience researching and writing about Latin American modern art, film, literature, architecture and material culture. He is editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and author of the books New Argentine Cinema (2011), The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007) and Mapas de poder:una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (2000).