PERFORMING AND MEDIA ARTS IN THE POST-CONFLICT CITY
4-5 APRIL, 2013 AT QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST
Developing from the work of the Belfast-Sarajevo Initiative (2007-2010), the School of Creative Arts at Queen’s, in association with the British Academy, is hosting this conference to examine how theatre, performance, film, and the visual arts address post-conflict situations, and intends to encourage interdisciplinary discussion on the contemporary arts and their relation to issues of testimony, witnessing, forgetting, representation, healing, reconciliation, agency, and metaphor.The Cities of Memory research project aims to develop methods and resources for studying the role of the performing and media arts in post-conflict cities, and regions. Building on the work of the Belfast-Sarajevo Initiative (2007-2010), a forum that facilitated dialogue between artists and practitioners from both cities through a series of collaborative workshops, screenings, exhibitions, and performances, Cities of Memory has been awarded British Academy funding to situate this praxis in a comparative critical framework through the organization of an international conference, the production of an edited book, and the development of the project website.
The website has been created to publicize the work of the project, and provide a resource for scholars and practitioners working in the areas of contemporary Irish, Bosnian, and European theatre, film and visual arts to compare how these art forms engage with questions of memory and testimony, and the politics of reconciliation and conflict transformation.
Artist and researcher Zoran Poposki is presenting a paper together with Marija Todorova on Resisting Narratives of Ethnicity and Disintegration through Civic Art.
