Dove e quando

Compared to vision, touch has often occupied a marginal position in both philosophical reflection and Western artistic practice. Yet touch is a fundamental way of exploring the world, relating to others, and engaging with objects and environments. Touching and being touched can express care, intimacy, recognition, and consent, but also control, intrusion, and vulnerability, while our tactile interactions with objects give access to distinctive aesthetic properties that play a central role in everyday life. In recent decades, artists, curators, and museums have increasingly challenged the primacy of vision, exploring touch as an autonomous mode of aesthetic experience, artistic creation, accessibility, and care.

Despite this growing practical interest, however, the theoretical resources for understanding haptic experience remain comparatively underdeveloped. This symposium brings together perspectives from aesthetics, artistic practice, curatorial and accessibility studies, and the aesthetics of care to investigate touch as a perceptual modality, a gesture, a form of relation, and a medium of artistic production.

The symposium will address a number of questions: How does contact generate different meanings depending on the bodies, objects, and contexts involved? What norms govern touching and being touched? How does the experience and evaluation of an artwork change when touch becomes a mode of access and engagement? And how can artistic and curatorial practices contribute to rethinking the relationship between haptic experience, accessibility, and care? The aim is to create a space for dialogue between theoretical and practical perspectives in order to show how touch can transform the ways in which we encounter artworks, other people, and the spaces we inhabit.

The symposium is organized by Institut ACTE and École doctorale 279 APESA, in partnership with the University of Genoa and the ERC Starting Grant project PEA – The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts (GA 101040535).

Programme

09:15–09:30 – Welcome and Introduction
Barbara Formis, Ying Wu, Luca Marchetti, and Camilla Palazzolo

09:30–10:20 – Opening Keynote Lecture
Georgina Kleege (University of California, Berkeley)
Choreographies of Touch: Temporalities of Haptic Art
Chair: Camilla Palazzolo

10:20–10:40 – Coffee Break

10:40–12:30 – Panel 1: Hapticity and Aesthetics
Chair: Pascale Weber
10:40–11:00 – Camilla Palazzolo (University of Genoa)
Meaning through Touch: The Expressive Value of Touch in Art
11:00–11:20 – Barbara Formis (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Touching, Moving, Feeling
11:20–11:40 – Luca Marchetti (University of Genoa)
The Aesthetics of Everyday Touch
11:40–12:00 – Ágnes Pethő (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania)
Affective Intermediality and Gestures of the Photofilmic Touch
12:00–12:30 – Discussion

12:30–14:00 – Lunch Break

14:00–15:30 – Panel 2: Touch and Artistic Practice
Chair: Ágnes Pethő
14:00–14:20 – Suzanne Boulet (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne)
“Aptic” Art Practices as Practices of Care?
14:20–14:40 – Pascale Weber (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
A Story of Fragility
14:40–15:00 – Ed Williams (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
The Haptic Uncertainty of Tonality
15:00–15:30 – Discussion

15:30–17:00 – Panel 3: Gestures of Care
Chair: Barbara Formis
15:30–15:50 – Serena Massimo (Université Paris Nanterre)
Gestural Repetition as a Haptic Pedagogy of Making Common: The Dalcroze Method with Children with Disabilities
15:50–16:10 – Ying Wu (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Song Dong’s Touching My Father and Its Ethical Controversy
16:10–16:30 – Fabrice Bourlez (ESAD Reims)
Queer Gestures and the Ethics of Touch
16:30–17:00 – Discussion

17:00–17:20 – Coffee Break

17:20–18:10 – Closing Keynote Lecture
Ken Wilder (University of the Arts London)
Haptic Touch and the Ontology of Sculpture
Chair: Luca Marchetti

Organizers

Barbara Formis (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Ying Wu (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Luca Marchetti (University of Genoa)
Camilla Palazzolo (University of Genoa)

Attendance is free. Registration is required for in-person participants external to Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Further information and registration:
https://institut-acte.pantheonsorbonne.fr/evenements/haptic-encounters-touch-art-and-gestures-care-symposium