Haptic Encounters: Touch, Art and Gestures of Care Symposium

Résumé (en anglais) : 

Compared to vision, touch has often occupied a marginal position in both philosophical reflection and Western artistic practice. Yet touch is a fundamental way of exploring the world, relating to others, and engaging with objects and environments. Touching and being touched can express care, intimacy, recognition, and consent, but also control, intrusion, and vulnerability, while our tactile interactions with objects gives access to distinctive aesthetic properties that play a central role in everyday life. In recent decades, artists, curators and museums have increasingly challenged the primacy of vision, exploring touch as an autonomous mode of aesthetic experience, artistic creation, accessibility, and care. Despite this growing practical interest, however, the theoretical resources for understanding haptic experience remain comparatively underdeveloped. This study day brings together perspectives from aesthetics, artistic practice, curatorial and accessibility studies, and the aesthetics of care to investigate touch as a perceptual modality, a gesture, a form of relation, and a medium of artistic production. The symposium will address a number of questions:  how does contact generate different meanings depending on the bodies, objects, and contexts involved? What norms govern touching and being touched? How does the experience and evaluation of an artwork change when touch becomes a mode of access and engagement? And how can artistic and curatorial practices contribute to rethinking the relationship between haptic experience, accessibility, and care? The aim is to create a space for dialogue between theoretical and practical perspectives in order to underline how touch can transform the ways in which we encounter artworks, other people, and the spaces we inhabit.

Intervenantes et intervenantes : Suzanne Boulet; Fabrice Bourlez; Barbara Formis; Georgina Kleege; Luca Marchetti; Serena Massimo; Camilla Palazzolo; Ágnes Pethő; Pascale Weber; Ed Williams; Ken Wilder; Ying Wu.

Pour assister au symposium en présentiel, l’inscription est obligatoire pour les personnes extérieures à l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne : 

Comité d'organisation : 

Barbara Formis, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne 
Ying Wu, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne 
Luca Marchetti,  University of Genoa 
Camilla Palazzolo, University of Genoa

Institut ACTE (UR 7539 Arts, créations, théories, esthétique),  
École doctorale 279 APESA (Arts plastiques, Esthétique et Sciences de l’Art) 
Università degli Studi di Genova PEA - The Philosophy of Experiential 
Artifacts 
Research project: Horizon Europe ERCStg 2021 G.A. n. 101040535t:0535