“Single Acts” is the second workshop of the “Showing Up” project, which explores performativity through a series of interventions in the public sphere. Developed on the intersection between philosophy and visual art and co-created by artist Saša Karalić, philosopher Željko Radinković and architect Snežana Vesnić, this transdisciplinary project will result in a performance, conference and film.
The workshop “Single Acts” includes individual interventions, conversations with workshop participants, and lectures by Snežana Vesnić, Željko Radinković, and Zoran Erić. The interventions and conversations were performed and recorded between May 11th and 15th in a public space in the center of Belgrade, and the lectures took place on May 12th at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory.
In her presentation “From Act to Appearance: Disjunctions of the Real”, Snežana Vesnić (de)constructs a sequence of disjunctions, aiming to introduce the problem of the content of the “act”, which is necessary to create the “appearance.” Her intention is to explain how the difference in the impossibility of superposition of act and appearance causes disjunctions of the real. Moreover, such exclusion of either the act or the real is constituted in the difference that becomes contingent on the “creation” of language. This implies the act of addressing someone, the manifestation of what is addressed, and the announcement that the message has been received. Language has meaning only insofar as there are subjects who give meaning to certain expressions, gestures, and actions in specific types of mental and physical acts.
Željko Radinović’s lecture “Understanding and Performativity“ deals with the limits of the analytical approach to the problem of performativity and attempts a hermeneutic in order to open up a context- and time-oriented view of the problem.
The lecture “Dérive: Theory and Practice of the Situationist International“ by Zoran Erić presents several basic concepts and tactics for behavior and action in urban public spaces developed by Situationist International. The focus is on the concepts of dérive and détournement which this group of “layman philosophers” headed by Guy Debord conceived in the 1950s within the framework of the Letterist International as a basic strategy for “creating situations”, and the struggle for “dismantling ” current capitalist forms of domination and degradation.
Biographies:
Snežana Vesnić is an architect and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade. Her theoretical and practical work focuses on architectural philosophy and aesthetics, especially on the production of “architectural concepts.” She is the author of the book Architectural Concept: the Object of Reality and the Subject of Illusion (2020).
Zoran Erić is an art historian, curator, and lecturer. He holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Media, Bauhaus University in Weimar. His focus is on theoretical research, workshops, and international projects which deal with issues derived from the meeting points of human geography, spatial-cultural discourse, theory of radical democracy, and political ecology.
Željko Radinković is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Belgrade. He studied and received his doctorate at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. He mainly deals with phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophy of technique, philosophy of culture, and biopolitics. He translated numerous philosophical texts from the German language.
Saša Karalić is a visual artist and writer. The reoccurring subject in his work is the relationship between public discourse and ideology. His first novel “Three Signs of a Circle” was published in 2020 by Belgrade’s Geopoetika. Karalić is a regular lecturer at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and a guest lecturer at the University of Arts in Bern.
