FORUM: Altered States | Keynote & Performance

Due to Coronavirus restrictions the FORUM: Altered States will now take place only on Saturday 11 December. The KEYNOTE program will now be live-streamed via our Website, Youtube, and Facebook. Previously booked tickets will be refunded.

The FORUM: ‘Altered States’ coincides with the launch of Ignota Books' new poetry anthology of the same name which asks the timely question; can altered states produce altered worlds? The afternoon program features a live-streamed program of song and image study, culminating in a Keynote lecture by poet and essayist Anne Boyer.

SCHEDULE

- 14:30 Cora Schmeiser, Choral performance of Hildegard van Bingnen
- 15:00 Lisa Tan, DODGE AND BURN, 2017-2020 JULY 4
- 15:30 Anne Boyer, KEYNOTE with Q&A by Mia You

The Fallen Angel of the Senses
On angelic mediation, unthinkable sensoriums, and the information damaged world.

Anne Boyer is renowned as one of the most prescient voices in contemporary poetry and non-fiction literature. Her most recent book, The Undying, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction with a literary account of breast cancer, survival, and the medical-industrial system. Published in 2019, it would be hard to imagine how significant its narrative would be in the pandemic era. In this KEYNOTE lecture, The Fallen Angel of the Senses, Boyer looks both back into history through literature and pre-modern angelology, as well as ahead in charting ways through the broader ramifications of the pandemic upon our daily lives.

The KEYNOTE will be moderated by poet and teacher at the Sandberg Instituut and University of Utrecht Mia You. The lecture is presented in partnership with Stichting Perdu as part of the FORUM ‘Altered States’ co-presented with Ignota Books.

The program will open with a choral performance by Cora Schmeiser, a foremost interpreter of the music compositions of von Bingen. Born in Mainz, the same region where Hildegard von Bingen lived, Cora feels connected with the work of this extraordinary personality from another century.

The FORUM program also features an image lecture ‘Dodge and Burn’ by 84 STEPS artist Lisa Tan. This presentation begins with a blunder. “I pressed stop instead of record,” writes Lisa Tan. The mishap occurs during the first of three, consecutive attempts to film fireworks on the 4th of July, from the vantage point of a passenger on a commercial airliner destined for Los Angeles International Airport. Through this evasion, she discovers how an image refusing capture reveals far more in its absence. We are taken on a journey that reaches for the role of images in a time of visual and information overload, sensing how forms of violence are ever more frequently self-inflicted under prevailing structures, including the condition of burnout, troubling the established limits of representation.