Organised by the DSRA Document & Contemporary Art (ÉESI – ENSA, Bourges)
15 December 9:30 am – 6:00 pm at ENSBA, Paris

This day-long symposium will seek to shed sustained and variegated light on some of the lines of enquiry of a year’s research around the figure of the dam. Understood in the broadest sense, both in terms of its physical and metaphorical (political, philosophical, psychoanalytic) dimensions, the dam is a landscape-transforming device producing often dramatic environmental consequences. Sources of energy and emblems of resistance, but only at the exorbitant cost of massive inundations (of peoples, histories, fauna and flora), capture (of water, ideas, information) and inevitable breaches, dams prevent, but also repurpose, institute and destitute. To the same degree that they enable the accumulation of power, they interrupt flows. Energy accumulators for some, impediments to differential flux for others, dams divide; and as such represent in the concreteness of a human construction the capture of a figure of agency which has yet to be defined. In short, the dam remains an ambiguous construct, and a source of conflicts around issues that directly affect us today: water, energy, ecosystems.

Speakers:

Aline Benchemhoun : « L’autre en soi »



Louise Deltrieux : « Welcome Home » (projection)



Andreas Maria Fohr : « Kraftwerk »



Ferenc Grof : « Écluses, digues et boues rouges – sur le voyage d’étude à Budapest »



Matteo Locci : « I never thought it was a dam »



Anna Romanenko : « Operation Chastise »



Asli Seven : « Du diable des comparaisons à la double conscience agitée du chercheur en art»



Elisa Strinna : « The Life Which Has Still To come  »



Mabel Tapia : « De quoi l’expression “faire barrage” est-elle le nom aujourd’hui ? »



Stephen Wright : « Un barrage au temps de la fin »