{"id":1772,"date":"2026-04-24T12:28:56","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T09:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parc.lmta.lt\/renginys\/international-symposium-posthumanism-and-contemporary-artistic-practices\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T14:02:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T11:02:32","slug":"international-symposium-posthumanism-and-contemporary-artistic-practices","status":"publish","type":"renginys","link":"https:\/\/parc.lmta.lt\/en\/renginys\/international-symposium-posthumanism-and-contemporary-artistic-practices\/","title":{"rendered":"International Symposium \u201cPosthumanism and Contemporary Artistic Practices\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

7-8 May 2026
LMTA Central Building (Gedimino pr. 42, Vilnius)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The symposium is dedicated to the entanglements between posthuman forms of knowledge and contemporary artistic practices. Posthumanism, as defined by Rosi Braidotti, is a critical methodology aiming to question both humanism and anthropocentrism (Braidotti 2013, 2018; Braidotti and Bignall 2019). First, posthumanism can be seen as a critique of the humanist model of \u2018Man\u2019, which is based on the project of the Enlightenment and expresses \u2018the Eurocentric, masculinist universalism that is still operative in the most knowledge production scientific systems\u2019 (Braidotti and Bignall 2019: 2). By contrast, posthumanism offers partial and perspectival \u2018situated knowledges\u2019, which take into account feminism, gender theory, postcolonialism, decolonial theory and emerging indigenous philosophies. Second, posthumanism can be seen as a critique of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, based on species hierarchy and the subjection and exclusion of nonhuman others. Posthumanism raises \u2018the question of the animal\u2019 and asks what place animals take in our all-too-human ontology (Derrida 2008; Despret 2016). It challenges the rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, demonstrating that they share capacities such as sentience, affectivity, inventiveness, memory, and cognition. In this respect, posthumanism can be seen as an inclusive way of thinking that attempts to conceptualise what is \u2018more-than-human\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a conceptualisation is not an easy task. As Cary Wolfe suggests, \u2018when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking about a thematics of the decentering of the human [\u2026]; rather [\u2026] we are talking about how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought has to become in the face of those challenges\u2019 (Wolfe 2010: xvi). This implies the need to rethink our research methodologies and the necessity to redefine human subjectivity in such a way that it would include multiple modes of existence. As Wolfe explains, \u201cthe \u2018human\u2019 can no longer be considered either the origin or the end of thought, and in at least two senses. First, the \u2018human\u2019 is not an explanans but an explanandum, not an explanation but that which needs to be explained. (\u2026) Moreover \u2013 and more radically \u2013 not only is the line between human and nonhuman impossible to definitively draw with regard to the binding together of neurophysiology, cognitive states and symbolic behaviours, the line between \u2018inside\u2019 and \u2018outside\u2019, \u2018brain\u2019 and \u2018mind\u2019, is also impossible to draw definitively\u201d (Wolfe 2018: 357\u20138). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, posthumanism is a new way of thinking, oriented towards the multiplicity of connections between inorganic and organic, human and nonhuman, human and technological beings. Besides the conventional forms of knowledge, posthuman knowledge takes into account affect and affectivity (Brian Massumi, Patricia Clough), nonconscious cognition (Antonio Damasio, N. Katherine Hayles), relationality (Bruno Latour, Karen Barad), materialism (Jane Bennett), speculative fabulation (Donna Haraway), and perspectivism (D\u00e9borah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro). These different approaches create a kind of \u201cpatchy posthumanism\u201d which is heterogeneous, discontinuous, and provisional. It leaves us in a permanent discontent because it does not provide a unified vision of the world, and is not comforting or reassuring. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, this \u201cpatchy posthumanism\u201d opens the way not only for new fields of knowledge but also initiates new, non-representational ways of artistic expression. The symposium encourages examining those artistic practices which are based on experimentation, research, and collaboration. As Justyna St\u0119pie\u0144 points out, contemporary artists \u201capply non-representational methods that move towards relations, actions, and events (\u2026) to apprehend the structures of change and dynamism of socio-material entities, reinventing human practices of care and concern. These artistic expressions are embodied and embedded, experimental in their nature, unsettling, rupturing, rather than reporting or representing\u201d (St\u0119pie\u0144 2022: 6). In other words, to entangle with posthuman or more-than-human entities, artists and theoreticians have to invent new modes of artistic practices, which would destabilise human subjectivity through hybrid, experimental, performative, or biomediated encounters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

References:<\/p>\n\n\n\n