On Fragility: One-day symposium at Cinema Europa

What does it mean to create from within fragile conditions? 

In what ways is identity negotiated in ruins?

How can we come together responsibly? 

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The one-day symposium reflects on the many ways in which fragility imbues peripheral worlds, specifically the complex borderlands of East/West, human/nonhuman. How does one live with histories of dispossession, in the violent aftermaths of (failed) modernities and on the verge of ecological ruin? 

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Fragility is as much an emotion as it is a material reality, a quality of bodies and environments that engenders a state of uncertainty about the future. Reflecting on fragility comes with the acknowledgement that we are already always affected. Necessarily implicated in multiple life webs, we are prone to damage and destruction, with varying abilities to respond. 

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Considering fragility as a method of togetherness, the symposium channels both closeness and distance in a collectivity, encouraging multiple ways of seeing and participating, from spectatorship to active engagement. 

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SCHEDULE

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12.00 - 13.00 

Introduction and collective reading 

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13.00 - 13.45 

Short film screenings

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[paˈlʲit͡sʲ], 2023, Ania Mokrzycka, 19’07’’ (United Kingdom, Poland)

Circulation, 2020, Oleksiy Radynski, 12’00’’ (Ukraine, United Kingdom) 

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13.45 - 14.30 

Coffee & snacks 

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14.30 - 16:30

Talks and closing discussion 

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Traces in the City. The Uranus Now Project.

Talk by Stefan Ghenciulescu 

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In Ruins / “In Search of Identity”

Talk by Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter

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Project co-financed by AFCN