Seminar: Playing the Decolonial; Humor, Art, Tech
In two previous seminars, we have explored the concepts of play and playfulness and the role they play in building worlds and alternative realities. In this seminar, we will add humor and treat play and humor as affective drives seriously. Acknowledging that humor is derivative and parasitical to serious and heavy situations, we will look at the role of humor and playfulness in decolonizing endeavors in a range of fields – arts, games, media – and technology practices, education, comedy genres. We claim that playfulness and humor open up a field of practice rather than being just another tool in the critical toolbox. Humor and playfulness inject ambiguity, opaqueness, and dissonance into the fields in which they operate. It also seems that humor and subject-formation belong together, as well as humor and playfulness are engaging with boundary-drawing processes and vectors of inclusion and exclusion. We ask the very simple question: what does humor and playfulness bring to the table in decolonial agendas?
Link: http://decolonisingplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Play-Decolonial-Program-color.pdf
Lecture: Naja Dyrendom Graugaard
Panel debate with Inunnguaq Reimer, Lili F. Chemnitz, Qarsoq Høegh-Dam, Vivi Vold, Paninnguaq Pikilak
Facilitator: Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Tech. instruktør: Asge Matthiesen, So-me kunstnere: Inunnguaq Reimer, Lili F. Chemnitz, Qarsoq Høegh-Dam, Vivi Vold, Paninnguaq Pikilak
Workshop: Creative-critical and Participatory Research Methods
Organized by AIAS Associate Fellow Alan O’Leary and The Filmmaking Research, Academic Film and Videographic Criticism Research Unit, in collaboration with Britta Timm Knudsen and Peter M. Boenisch, Directors, Cultural Transformations Research Programme
Seminar: The final seminar of Monica Portzionato around her Ph.d thesis
Lecture: Play and humour in Kalaallit decolonial artistic practices
The historical and contemporary Danish colonial repression of Kalaallit is receiving increased attention in public media, politics, and academic work. The resurfacing of ‘forgotten’ and silenced Kalaallit experiences of Danish colonialism has mobilized renewed public and political calls to revise and decolonize the relations between Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat. This development has also stimulated – often heated, and at times divisive – debates on the ‘rights and wrongs’ of the colonial history and its current repercussions. While these debates put pressure on colonial ignorance, they also tend to manifest white fragility, settler anxiety, and aversion towards the decolonization process, both between and within the affected peoples and populations.
In this lecture, post.doc researcher Naja Dyrendom Graugaard will present how Kalaallit artists, SoMe actors, and meme-makers employ playfulness as a transformative way to engage with the ‘unfinished business of decolonization’. In the recent movement to decolonize Danish-Kalaallit relations, several Kalaallit artworks, memes, and performative videos have challenged the ongoing experiences of Danish colonialism by using humour, satire, irony, excess, etc. Exemplified by their work, Graugaard will discuss how such forms and modes of playfulness resist dominant structures and stereotypes, subvert power relations and subject positionings. Attending to the (often overlooked) wealth of materials, experiences, and decolonizing strategies that ‘playfulness’ presents, the lecture discusses how Kalaallit decolonial artistic expressions may present alternative modes of unsettling colonial relations today.
Lecturer: Naja Dyrendom Graugaard
The lecture is held as part of Forum Lectures organized by Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Art as Forum, Copenhagen University
Seminar: A Conversation on Decolonization in Higher Education and Research
A seminar exploring the complexities of decolonial theory and praxis in academia. This seminar offers engaging presentations, discussions, and reflective exercises. They will delve into their decolonial projects in, respectively, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Latin America, focusing on three key themes: Positionality, colonial relations and the decolonial option. This seminar will encourage self-reflection and explore ways to apply abstract theories within the complex landscape of knowledge production.
Facilitators: Freja Ruby Flejsborg, Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Hjørdis Joanardóttir Poulsen
The seminar is hosted by the Research Unit Postcolonial Entanglements.
Research Seminar: Forms of play
”If we could accept this meaninglessness of the world, then we could play with forms, appearances and our impulses, without worrying about their ultimate destination”.
– Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange.
According to Baudrillard’s idea of simulation, contemporary societies have all but lost any connection to what used to be considered ‘reality’. Instead, the social have become a place for the accelerated circulation, mediatization and consumption of images no longer pinned down by anything solid or external: it is a realm of play.
Postmodern theories emphasized that such a divorce from ‘the real’ as a guarantee of 'truth' could be potentially liberating because it allowed for a ‘play’ with new social modes and forms, and paved the way for new ways of playful resistance as seduction, excess or hyperbole. Other more materially grounded theories – Deleuzian material philosophy and new materialism – have since widened the scope of the ‘real’ to include the virtuality or fictionality of the real. This means that the imagining, and temporary creation of alternative worlds that question hierarchies and pursue futurability of new modes of community, draws centrally on playful elements in building forms of cultural and social praxis.
At our previous seminar – Playful Attitudes; Popular Culture, Politics and Participation – we focused on play and playfulness conceptually and how it appears in phenomena where you least expect it, and sometimes also in less liberating and inclusive ways. This coming seminar will focus on the ‘forms of play’ in a variety of fields of practice such as Fan Culture, Literature, Activism, Performance Arts and Game Culture. We will focus on which forms – such as rhetorical strategies, tactics, imitative plays, re- and pre-enactments, or the aesthetic uses of matter and sitespecificity – the playful virtuality and fictionality of the real may take.
Organizers: Matthias Stephan, Britta Timm Knudsen, Christoffer Kølvraa, and Claus Toft-Nielsen
Lecture: Kan kunst og dekolonisering være grineren?
Der er i disse år en voksende opmærksomhed på Danmarks koloniale virke i Grønland. En opmærksomhed, der bringer nye og kritiske blikke på historien og dens konsekvenser for nutiden. Og her spiller kunst, humor og sociale medier en særlig rolle! Igennem forskellige kunstneriske udtryksformer – fra malerier til internetfænomener – udfordrer grønlandske kunstnere dansk kolonialisme på nye, kritiske og sjove måder.
Foredragsholder: Naja Dyrendom Graugaard
Foredraget holdes som led i SMK Akademiets foredragsrække: ’Grønlandsk kunst i bevægelse’
Link: https://www.smk.dk/event/smk-akademiet-groenlandsk-kunst-i-forandring/
In this workshop, we will examine aspects of coloniality and decoloniality in Arctic research, and begin to unpack how (privileged) researcher positionality, power dynamics, and knowledge regimes affect existing research relationships. By bringing in our own experiences, we will critically reflect on how we – as Indigenous or non-Indigenous researchers, participants affected by research etc. – shape interactions and research encounters. We will explore how reflexivity on our own practices may provide new reflections on ways to unsettle colonial research relations and transform praxis. In this work, those of our engagements, where we sense meaningful communication and equitable relations have failed, also become a site of learning.
Facilitator: Naja Dyrendom Graugaard
The workshop is held as part of “A Week of Exchange: Ethics and Methods in Arctic Transformative Research”, hosted by Arctic Governance Research Group at the Research Institute for Sustainability Helmholtz Centre Potsdam and Biodiverse Anthropocene at University of Oulu.
Workshop: Participation and talk in 'Films, Museums and Kalaallit Nunaat’
A workshop seeking to pose questions about how museums use film to promote, communicate, and research their collections, and how filmmaking form Kalaallit Nunaat can help shape these processes. The aim is to bring together community stakeholders, as well as those more broadly in the filmmaking profession to engage viewpoints from several different perspectives and experiences.
Co-organized by Josefine Baark (Dept. Of Art history, Aesthetics & Culture, Aarhus University) Bart Pushaw (Art Department, University of Tennessee Chattanooga.
Invited participant: Naja Dyrendom Graugaard
One day workshop for team and associate team: Playing with Ghosts
Participants: Britta Timm Knudsen, Meghna Singh, Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Aysha Amin and Abdul Dube Zoom & presentation by Ingrid Kopp (co-founder and director of Electric South)
Conference: ‘Nunarput - Land Back’ hosted by Partii Naleraq
The conference will center on colonialism, decolonization, Inuit self-determination, Inuit mental health, Inuit businesses and Greenland’s independence. The purpose of the conference is to give citizens, researchers, professionals and politicians the opportunity to meet, discuss and share knowledge and experiences on the topics.
Panel discussion participant, ‘Colonial atrocities’: Naja D. Graugaard
The concept of play or playfulness is once again returning to the center of many academic debates and displaying an astonishing interdisciplinary range across various fields such as pedagogy and didactics, game- and fan studies, anthropology, literary theory, cultural studies, and political science. Ideas and practices of play are now increasingly key both in innovative work in fields which have traditionally been concerned with play and in fields where play or playfulness has not earlier been part of the standard vocabulary.
Indeed, in contemporary societies play seems to be an ever more expansive cultural praxis, and ‘playfulness’ is an attitude increasingly identifiable also in contexts traditionally pervaded by high seriousness. Thought of as the constitution of a space of ‘make believe’ play can temporarily suspend the rules and roles of ‘real life’. The attitude of playfulness therefore shows itself to be a powerful tool for a wider range of actors and processes and can license not just lightheartedness, but also immersive enjoyment, excess, experimentation, and a disregard for the ‘real’ consequences of actions. It pervades contemporary cultural, political, and social practices from mobilizing fan communities to constituting engaged audiences of participatory artforms, from political gaming and playful activism, and from immersive media-consumption to ideological excess.
What this should alert us to is that play must now be examined as it appears in odd contexts, among new kinds of actors and with a much more ambiguous normative agenda than is often assumed. Play today slips easily from the leisurely to the activist, from inclusive values to aggressive bullying, from being lighthearted to going Dark, from heralding progressive experimentation to being insidiously parasitic.
Given this extraordinary richness of the concept, this seminar aims to facilitate a discussion of what might still constitute the definitional core elements of play and playfulness today, and of the various and often ambiguous contexts in which play might be identified as a core dynamic.
Organizers: Christoffer Kølvraa, Matthias Stephan, Claus Toft Nielsen and Britta Timm Knudsen
Aarhus University’s Diversity Lab in Copenhagen
Contact: Britta Timm Knudsen (norbtk@cc.au.dk)
Institute for Communication and Culture, ARTS, Aarhus University
Grant info: AUFF NOVA Grant 1.6. 2023 – 31.12.2025 (2.489.900 DKK)
Bevillingsnummer: AUFF-E-2022-9-7
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