IMMA International Summer School is a programme of online of talks, seminars, discussions and workshops over three weeks in June and July 2021. This programme is free and will feature a range of national and international artists, theorists and educators. Focusing on the theme of ‘containment’ they will explore how mapping, border regimes, architecture and the politics of incarceration inflect contemporary culture and how art and artists explore, question and engage with this subject.
Applications for the summer school are now closed.
For further details of the public programme and speakers click here.
Containment is a fundamental feature of the human condition; our earliest experience is of being held and contained by another. Containment can enable us to feel safe but it can also be experienced in terms of confinement and separation. Containment can be applied to how we conceptualise space, material and data, how we ‘map’ our surroundings or claim territory, and how we think through lines, categories and borders. Containment can be a political strategy (such as US foreign policy during the cold war) or a strategy for social control; in fact the logic of containment continues to animate current border regimes and technologies worldwide. Strategies of containment also underpin the politics of incarceration and detention, as well as informing recent public health measures in response to the pandemic.
Some of the ideas that will be explored include the uses of mapping as a strategy of both appropriation and resistance; the role of borders and border technologies; carceral capitalism; containment and public health; architectures of containment; containment as a psychic state; cognitive mapping and figure-ground apprehension.
Two fundamental questions underpin this year’s Summer School: What role does containment play in the way we conceive of and organise the world around us, and how can art and artists reflect on and critique these cultural, social and cognitive strategies of containment?
To explore these questions, we are bringing together a range of contributors – artists, writers and educators – including Beatriz Colomina, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Romuald Hazoumè, Jackie Wang, Emma Wolf-Haugh, Nils Norman, Rajinder Singh and Alice Feldman, RESOLVE, Clodagh Emoe, Sarah Karikó, John Wilkins, Kimberly Campanello, Vukašin Nedeljković and Róisín Power Hackett.