On 7 December 2024, at 4pm, the Belém Cultural Centre (CCB) will host another edition of the ‘Other Spaces’ conference cycle, on the theme ‘On the margins of freedom: the will to the impossible’. The event will take place at the CCB's Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC/CCB) and admission is free.
The conference will be led by CICANT researcher Jonas Runas.
The cycle, which is the result of a partnership between the Belém Cultural Centre, the School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies (ECATI) and the Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies (CICANT), proposes an interdisciplinary reflection on contemporary issues, encouraging the participation of experts and the public to explore the meaning and limits of freedom today.
More information about the event is available here.
Synopsis
On the margins of freedom, where borders blur and certainty dissolves, one finds strange self-enchantments like Rimbaud's ‘free freedom’ - an unlimited anarchic liberation that rises to the impotence of freedom, lawless poetry that opens the void to the excess of desire and overcomes the paradoxes of autonomy in realms of pure potentiality. The Universe could perfectly well do without Life: it is from this superfluity that its strength and daring come. Thrown into existence without a net, under the starry sky, it is in life that nature plays the game of surpassing itself, faced with the constant threat of being enslaved by the given, crushed by the laws of the cosmos or reduced to nothingness (its irreversible destiny). Fully accepting freedom means transforming it into its opposite, because it is only in negation that freedom can overcome itself. Abandoning the known in order to depend solely on the power of the unknown (essential value) implies nothing less than a will to the impossible.
About the Conference Cycle
The ‘Other Spaces’ conference cycle is a partnership between the Belém Cultural Centre, the School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies (ECATI) and the Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies (CICANT).
Presenting itself as a space for plural dialogue, this partnership seeks to connect academic and scientific production with the community and provide the transmission of knowledge. The actions carried out by each institution include the activation of thematic synergies between areas such as visual arts, cinema, performing arts and sound arts, communication and culture, architecture and new digital devices.