events: Visual studies today: The power of images
Abstracts
Andrej Mirčev
Towards a Performative Cartography of Images
The paper aims to demonstrate and exemplify a pedagogical strategy which deploys and performs images not only as a means of visual representation, but as tools for critical thinking about a specific regime of spatiality, located in between the archive, education and an ephemeral, intermedia art event. During this year’s course in Theory of Space and Modelling, held at the Art academy in Osijek, the students created an artistic intervention entitled Nuclear Love on the location of the former civil defense headquarters in the baroque part of the town Tvrdja. The installation made of slides, documents, super 8 mm films, urban maps and various objects for protection against nuclear attacks, generated a complex visual system, in which archival images and traces were juxtaposed to restaged images, performed by the students in a public space. The talk analyzes this experimental use of images in education, outlining a new approach to visual/spatial theory, where the border between theory and practice is unstable, and where images are understood in their performative dimension.