Saturday May 18 2 – 5.30pm followed by a wine and cheese reception open to all • In association with 126 Gallery, Galway • Curated and moderated by Katherine Waugh • Supported by The Cultural Service of the French Embassy Ireland

Participants include Professor Sylvere Lotringer, Professor Luke Gibbons, Professor Paolo Bartoloni, Dr Hadrien Laroche, Cultural and Scientific Counsellor, French embassy, Vivienne Dick, Dr. Deirdre O’ Mahony, Ruby Wallis, Dr. Gavin Murphy, Michaele Cutaya and James Merrigan (Fugitive Papers). Other contributors to be confirmed…

This symposium is organized to coincide with the visit of renowned French Professor Sylvere Lotringer to Galway as he re-traces the steps of Antonin Artaud to the city and the Aran Islands in 1937. The public discussion will precede his visit to Inis Mór to make a film on the subject emerging from a collaborative workshop on the island with international and local filmmakers and artists. His desire to transpose Artaud’s Mexican writings to Aran in his film provokes many challenging aesthetic and political questions about art, writing, nationality and translation.

Lotringer is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University in New York and the founding editor ofSemiotext(e) and he is generally credited for introducing French Theory to America.

The symposium will be structured around an open discussion with Lotringer, in which the question of how writing relates to art and politics will be framed by Lotringer’s lifelong love of the work of Antonin Artaud. Artaud’s visit will be used as a springboard from which a number of significant subjects will be explored throughout the afternoon. How can we in the West of Ireland read Artaud’s visit now and activate important connections it reveals between the European avant-garde from which he emerged and his expectations and aspirations for his pilgrimage to Galway at the time?

Over the years the ‘West’ as a concept has hovered between Romantic nationalist ideas and more clichéd tourist frameworks but is it possible for us to invigorate alternative intellectual and cultural associations through a re-examination of the artistic, literary and spatial concepts which dominate our understanding of the peripheral?

The ‘West’ in this sense can be framed in such a way that it refers to a sense of space and being peripheral in a conceptual manner which might align itself with Maurice Blanchot’s idea of thought from the ‘outside’. In Blanchot’s essay on Artaud from 1959 he wrote that:

“When we read these pages, we learn what we never succeed in knowing: that the fact of thinking cannot be anything other than devastating; that what is to be thought is that which, in thought, turns away from thought and inexhaustibly exhausts itself in it…”

How artists think of themselves and think about their work when they occupy a spatiality which is at the boundaries or on the fringes finds resonance with how many thinkers, in particular French writers such as Blanchot and Artaud, try to understand the limits of thought and its relationship with the body or the material world.

The symposium will begin with a discussion with Sylvere Lotringer about his extraordinary work in philosophy, publishing and art and will then expand into a broader conversation with invited artists, writers and academics who either live and practice on the fringes in geographical or conceptual terms, or have engaged with ideas from art, literature and philosophy touching on this subject.

The closing conversation with the editors of the publication Fugitive Papers, Michaële Cutaya and James Merrigan, will engage with the legacy of Lotringer’s groundbreaking and acclaimedSemiotext(e) publishing project and the possible connections to ‘peripheral’ publications in Ireland today attempting to open up new critical spaces around art.

Finally there will be open discussion involving all present responding to the various issues raised throughout the afternoon

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The symposium will begin at 2pm with an introduction by Katherine Waugh .

There will be an extended conversation between Sylvere Lotringer and Katherine Waugh about Lotringer’s personal relationship with art and literature and how this has influenced his theoretical engagement with so many leading thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Virilio, and Lotringer will also discuss his love of Artaud and his new film project.

The remainder of the symposium will consist of literary and artistic interventions intended to open the discussion out in the broadest possible terms.

Professor Luke Gibbons, Ireland’s leading intellectual and most original writer on Irish cultural, intellectual and literary history will engage with the legacy of Romanticism in terms of how we conceive of the ‘West’ and re-visit his writings on Joyce which touched on how Joyce sought to retrieve Galway, Aran and the Irish West for a modernist project, contesting the notion of the Irish West as being ‘provincial’.

Professor Paolo Bartoloni of the Italian Department NUIG who has written extensively on European Literature and its spatio-temporal singularities will speak about how some of his writing, from his work on Blanchot to Interstitial Spatiality to the complexities of translation might relate to the artistic and political subjects of a contemporary ‘West’ of Ireland.

Local artists, writers and filmmakers will intersperse these more theoretical and literary conversations with presentations on their practices which resonate with the ideas being discussed.

Vivienne Dick will present excerpts from a new film project, some of which is based on Artaud.

Other artists based in the West of Ireland including Deirdre O’Mahoney and Ruby Wallis will explore the potential for radical and challenging artistic projects in rural or fringe communities through a discussion of their separate practices.

The closing conversation with the editors of the publication Fugitive Papers, Michaële Cutaya and James Merrigan, will engage with the legacy of Lotringer’s groundbreaking and acclaimed Semiotext(e) publishing project and the possible connections for ‘peripheral’ publications in Ireland today attempting to open up new critical spaces around art.

The afternoon event will be structured in an open and informal way to facilitate the greatest level of audience engagement in the various discussions and there will be a closing wine reception open to all.