À. LORENA FUSTERTowards Another Thought-Image

(Photograph: Hernâni Reis Baptista, ÁGUA VIVA (detail), 2022)

Following the thread of the thought-images that has guided this project so far, we will track some of the traces that we find in philosophy, literature, and art about the very exercise of thinking. We will examine fragments of thought contained in Boeotian vessels, in epics, in dialogues and philosophical essays, as well as in medieval icons, in modern and contemporary portraits and sculptures to explore imaginatively some materials that may contribute to create a new image of thought that matches our present.

À. Lorena Fuster is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. Her research addresses the theme of imagination and imaginaries in contemporary thought, in particular through authors such as Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Agnes Heller, Luce Irigaray or Judith Butler. She is currently Principal Investigator of two projects on the relationship between women’s activism and philosophy between the 19th and 20th centuries (MUVAN and El legado olvidado de Clotilde Cerdà/Esmeralda Cervantes). She has been a researcher in national projects (VULFIL, TRAFILÓ, Women philosophers of the 20th century, SGR Women's Creation and Thinking, among others) and European projects (TRAMOD, HERA), in which she has addressed topics related to issues such as transmission, recognition, debt and vulnerability and the relationship between activism and philosophy, topics on which she has published several articles in journals and books, and has explored the creation and transmission of thought through different formats. She coordinates the International Lecture Series Arendtian Springs. She is director of the Seminar Philosophy and Gender / ADHUC- Research Centre for Theory, Gender, Sexuality and has been co-director of the Philosophy Festival Barcelona Pensa from 2020 until this year.

Thought-images

Thought-images gives the title to this cycle of conferences opening a space in Sismógrafo’s program to think images and through images. The purpose of these conferences is to unite the discursive and the image, to confront them, to recognize the potential of an image, of a fragment, rescuing vital experiences threatened in an uncertain present. This age, a turbulent and disturbing age, an age of pandemic, ecological, financial, political and social crises, these times of “post-truth” and "alternative facts” are "interesting times", to use the expression popularized by Eric Hobsbawm. Interesting times especially for thinking. Thinking is already contributing to a change. This cycle calls for a cooperation between the expressive strength of art and the precision of philosophy. Without a language that embraces images, images can blind us or say nothing. With these conferences, Sismógrafo seeks to take care of what Alexander Kluge calls a “garden of cooperation”, a place that preserves the moments when word and image converge in order to produce something new, a space for discrepancy and cooperation in the face of cacophonies of information, in the face of industrial manipulation and enslavement of feelings. In difficult times, times of divisions and segregations, cooperation presents itself as an antidote to tribalism (Richard Sennett). To open this garden, this space for debate and polyphony in the city, Sismógrafo has invited speakers linked to philosophy, aesthetics, art criticism, fine arts and cinema who, at different times and from different perspectives, will try to present a diagnosis of the present.