News Archive

An essay by ECLA of Bard faculty member Matthias Hurst on the film "Fearless" (1993, director Peter Weir) was just published in the volume Frieden als Balance in Psychotherapie und politischem Handlungsraum. Prozessdynamische Perspektiven [Peace as Equilibrium in Psychotherapy and Political Action Space. Dynamic Process Perspectives] (edited by Hermes A. Kick and Günter Dietz, Lit Verlag). The essay is titled "'Ich lebe!' Fearless -- Grenzsituation, Trauma und Suche nach innerem Frieden" ["'I'm alive!' Fearless -- Limit Situation, Trauma and the Search for Inner Peace"] and it explores the existential dimensions of the relation between life and death – a life towards death (Heidegger) –, the notions of despair (Kierkegaard) and limit situation (Jaspers), and the psychological processes of coping with traumatic experiences. Centerpiece of the essay is an interpretation of the film "Fearless" and its protagonist Max Klein (played by Jeff Bridges) with reference to both existential philosophy and therapeutic practices regarding cases of trauma and personality crisis: Max Klein survives a disastrous plane crash and shows a strange behavior of social detachment and fearlessness afterwards, which in fact covers a deep and dramatically growing alienation from life, his family, and himself. What seems to be a contemplative state of balance and inner peace is actually a spiritual crisis. The film depicts this crisis finding images and scenes that reveal Max' inner turmoil and his search for a new way to connect to people and to accept life.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

ECLA of Bard faculty member Geoff Lehman held a full-day session on Cindy Sherman for the ProArt Summer School 2013 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. ProArt Summer School is an interdisciplinary graduate program which encompasses disciplines like Art History, Musicology, Theatre Studies and Art Education. Its third edition, „Ars et circenses," took place between July 29 and August 3, 2013 and aimed to address issues like the contemporary function of art in society, the status of art in the entertainment sector today, or the impact of self-marketing on the role of the artist. Geoff Lehman's session, titled "Cindy Sherman and the Semiotics of Spectacle," was held on August 3rd. The session involved a consideration of Sherman's various photographic series from the 1970s to the present in relation to the problem of spectacle in contemporary art and popular culture, specifically through a discussion of the formal and semiotic conditions of her photographs – conditions that also implicate aspects of the photographic medium irreducible to semiotic definition (the presence of the real, the evocation of empathy).

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

ECLA of Bard student Aurelia Cojocaru (BA 2014, Moldova) is a young author who writes poems under the pseudonym Aura Maru. Her poem "Pariu" ("Bet") has just been published in the current issue (134/XXXIV. Jg./2013) of the Austrian magazine Lichtungen, dedicated to new Moldovan literature and featuring 9 other writers from this country. Aura Maru's poem has been translated into German by Gerhardt Csejka, who was granted in 2012 the International Literature Prize Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin for the translation of the novel Der Körper by Mircea C?rt?rescu. Lichtungen is a literary and art magazine founded in 1979 and published in Graz, with a special focus on Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Read the contents of the current issue here.

Meta: Type(s): Featured,General | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

ECLA of Bard faculty member Bruno Macaes has recently been appointed State Secretary for European Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Portugal. Dr. Bruno Macaes joined ECLA of Bard in 2008 and served as senior policy adviser to Portugal's Prime Minister from June 2011 to March 2013. His most recent publications deal with economic policy, structural reforms and the future of the eurozone.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

"Hotel Yeoville" was a technology driven, multi-platform, participatory public art project. From February through December 2010, the project was housed inside the brand new public library in Yeoville, an old, neglected suburb on the Eastern edge of the inner city of Johannesburg. The majority of Yeoville's estimated 40 000 inhabitants are migrants; micro communities from many parts of the African continent. The project in the library aimed to key into the diversity of immigrant and South African experiences that make the legendary suburb such a melting pot, and comprised a website and an interactive exhibition installation which took the form of a series of 12 private booths in which members of the public were invited to document themselves through a range of digital interfaces, interactive media and online applications. Every actual, physical space in the exhibition in the library had a corresponding virtual space online. Read more about the project here (official website) or here (recently published book by Terry Kurgan). Terry Kurgan is an artist, writer and curator based in Johannesburg, where she runs an active studio and public sphere practice. Her creative process is driven by a desire to establish relationships and directly engage with people, community and place – alongside a keen interest in the confluence of public and private realm issues and spaces. Her projects have been sited in spaces as diverse as a maternity hospital, a public library, a popular Johannesburg shopping mall, an inner city park and a prison. Her work has been awarded many prizes and grants, and she exhibits and publishes broadly in South Africa and internationally. Time: Tuesday, October 22, 2013 from 19:00 Venue: ECLA of Bard Main Auditorium Platanenstr. 98a, Berlin - Pankow (map here) Admission free

Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

From the volume's description: Paul Celan, arguably the mid-20th century's most important German-language poet, is commonly pigeonholed as a poet of the Holocaust—a term, however, he never used. Undoing facile assumptions about Celan, Corona charts a more idiosyncratic and personal path through Celan's large oeuvre, choosing 103 poems from among the more than 900 Celan published. The bilingual selection includes work from all of Celan's periods and genres. Without ignoring the poet's well-known work of memory and memorialization, it seeks to open a space for new appreciation of Celan's love poems, as well as his poems on political events, painful reflections on his stays in mental hospitals, and quasi-burlesque verse. Susan H. Gillespie's translations are characterized by their ease of diction and their attention to the "somatic" and rhetorical aspects of Celan's lines—their sound, gait, tone, and gravity—as well as to their internal and external echoes. The latter, elucidated in notes to the poems, include references to other poets and to Celan's wide readings of everything from specialized dictionaries to other writers—what Roman Jakobson called their "poetic etymology." "Here, poetry is not what gets lost in translation," writes Gillespie in the Introduction, "it is, itself, an act of translation—of experience and thought—into new language." The volume is scheduled to appear in November 2013 with Barrytown/Station Hill Press, Inc. The involvement of Susan H. Gillespie with the German language, and her commitment to the idea and practice of translatability, arise from her extensive post-graduate studies at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. She has translated Theodor W. Adorno and other writers of musicological and philosophical works, as well as fiction and poetry; and her book-length translations include The Correspondence of Paul Celan & Ilana Shmueli, a finalist for the National Translation Award. A graduate of Radcliffe College of Harvard University, she has worked in factories, offices, non-profit institutions, and since 1985 as Vice President of Bard College, where she founded the Institute for International Liberal Education, offering academic exchange programs with university partners in Russia, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, and Palestine, among other places. Paul Celan was born in Romania in 1920. In 1942, his parents were deported and died in an extermination camp. Celan escaped but was in a labor camp until 1944. In 1948, he settled in Paris, which remained his home until his suicide by drowning in 1970. Though he lived in France and was influenced by the French surrealists, he wrote his own poetry in German. Celan received the Bremen Prize for German Literature in 1958 and the Georg Buchner Prize in 1960. Time: Friday, September 6, 2013 from 19:30 Venue: ECLA of Bard Main Auditorium Platanenstr. 98a, Berlin - Pankow (map here) Admission free

Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |