This conference takes an interest in minutiae at the levels of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. It invites smaller-scale perspectives to interrogate the interrelations between form and content, and asks how aesthetics forms theory and how theory performs politics. Gravitating around those details that are often seen as inconsequential and unimportant, this conference gestures towards alternative ways of imagining and enacting form, performance, and the formless. Through the lenses of dust, drops, and gaps, reality looks different—blurred, unclear. Minima Formalia asks what role details play in understanding or altering our worldview, and whether one can make a grammar of small or empty gestures. Is the small, the unknown, the overlooked by definition better or more interesting than the big, the known, the noticed? Or does the devil lie in the details?

In English

9:30 Morning Coffee

9:45 – 10:00 Introduction by Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Jasmine Pisapia, Angelica Stathopoulos and Verónica Stedile Luna

10:00 – 11:45 Panel I ‘Gaps’
Introduction
Julian Isenia – Read Mi Like a Song: A Grammar of Redaction
Nile Davies – Pleasures of the Test
Discussion

11:45 – 12:15 Coffee Break

12:15 – 13:15 Screening
Works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha:
Mouth to Mouth (1975)
Vidéoème (1976)
White Dust from Mongolia (1980, unfinished)

13:15 – 14:45 Lunch Break

14:45 – 16:30 Panel II ‘Drops’
Introduction
Esther Leslie – Drop as Lens
Alvina Chamberland – Melting Drops and Shattered Glass
Discussion

16:30 – 17:00 Coffee Break

17:00 – 18:30 Tontänze / ToneDances (a selection)
Introduction
Performance by Jule Flierl & Antonia Baehr
Discussion

18:30 – 19:00 Break

19:00 – 20:45 Panel 3 ‘Dust’
Introduction
Natascha Sadr Haghighian – Composed of Many
Rebecca Comay – When the Dust Settles
Discussion

Organized by

Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Jasmine Pisapia, Angelica Stathopoulos, and Verónica Stedile Luna

How to Attend

• At the venue: To attend in person, please register using this form.
• No online attendance / no livestream available (in-person only).