ICI Edition

This talk addresses the question of the map and the territory through the intellectual and institutional history of queer studies. It has been the burden of queer thought to push back against philosophical realism and the idea that, for instance, gender is simply there, a set of incontrovertible biological facts or an ordinary feature of shared experience. The performativity thesis in queer theory has brought about a new era of gender freedom by loosening the relation between culture, language, and self-understanding from the ‘givens’ of the body, law, and history. But it has resulted in two problems, which Heather Love investigates in this talk: 1. Reference: the long-standing problem of material reality and its appearance within queer and trans theory and 2. Scale: the non-adequation between queer thought and the needs, interests, and self-understanding of the LGBT community. Love will argue that by taking the map for the territory, and representation for existence, queer scholars have not only made it difficult to address ‘bodies that matter’, they have also intensified the methodological problem of scale. Heather Love is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; in September 2026, she will join Rutgers University as the Kenneth Burke Chair of English. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (‘Rethinking Sex’) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations (‘Description Across Disciplines’). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project (‘To Be Real’), which addresses the uses of the personal in queer criticism

The models of scientists – to be found in their diagrams, equations, maps, and even machines – can be understood as their representations of phenomena in the world. But when we look back into how scientists created those models, we often find processes of narrative-making: scientists, in seeking to understand their part of the world, create narratives about how it might work. And then, in usage, we find those model-representations becoming tools: tools of exploration, explanation and reasoning, activities that often involve scientists telling narratives with their models. So narrative resources come into two processes of scientists’ modelling: first in spinning narratives to help fashion their models of the world, and second in using narrative accounts to reason with and explore their ‘world in the model’. Models and narratives seem odd bed-fellows, but are often conjoined in the creative work of science. Mary S. Morgan is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics; an elected Fellow of the British Academy; and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published on social scientists’ practices of modelling, observing, measuring and making case studies; and is especially interested in how ideas, numbers and facts are used in projects designed to change the world. Her most recent books are How Well Do Facts Travel? (2011) and The World in the Model (2012); and the outcome of a major ERC grant: Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800 (edited with Kim M. Hajek and Dominic J. Berry, 2022). The talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by Alina-Sandra Cucu and Julia Sánchez-Dorado

This event will engage with the debates surrounding Slow cinema as both an aesthetic movement and a political intervention. The discussion will focus on how extended duration and dead time in film have been seen as challenging capitalist temporalities while simultaneously risking recuperation by the very systems they purportedly resist. Works by directors like Chantal Akerman, Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, and Michelangelo Frammartino will be analysed to consider how Slow cinema’s radical engagement with the everyday — its focus on dead time and quotidian rhythms — may open up alternative ways of experiencing time and attention, yet often remains confined to exclusive art-house circuits. Slow cinema’s long takes and durational emphasis have been interpreted as producing profound shifts in spectatorial consciousness — ranging from boredom to deeper attunement with more-than-human temporalities. The event will explore what the style’s potential significance might be in our contemporary moment, and considers the possibility that such potential lies less in on-screen choices but, rather, in the urgent need to expand these alternative temporal valuations into new modes of production, distribution, and collective reception. Rosa Barotsi is a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Principal Investigator of the NextGeneration EU-funded project IMFilm. Her research and curatorial work explores the intersections of film, gender, and labour. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Frames network and the In Front of the Factory collective. She recently co-edited the special issue ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Screen Industries’ in Comunicazioni Sociali (2023). She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and a Fellow at ICI Berlin. James Burton is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural History at Goldsmiths. A former Fellow of the ICI, he publishes work in the areas of cultural theory, process philosophy and science fiction studies, with particular interests in the cultural roles of fabulation/storytelling, critical ecology, and animism.

The concept of ‘intersectionality’ has completely transformed a wide range of disciplines over the last few decades. From literary study to sociology, intersectional approaches—approaches that demand that scholars and activists look at the interplay of multiple social identities and locations in order to understand social life—have importantly become routine. But much less attention has been given to what intersectionality was introduced to help correct: the idea of a ‘single-axis analysis’, or an approach that putatively focuses on a single dimension of social life. Instead scholars have tended to take it for granted that they know what this means: that is, a ruinous distortion of the complexity of the social world and something that should be avoided. At the same time, and in some instances departing from intersectionality, influential scholars in recent years have again deployed ideas about the singularity of foundational social formations, particularly in order to understand Blackness and Indigeneity. Focusing on Euro-American scholarly frameworks for studying gender and sexuality, this talk will turn attention to the many functions and purposes of single axis analyses in order to complicate understanding of such frameworks and to develop literacies around their various meanings. Ben Nichols is a lecturer in gender and sexuality studies at the University of Manchester since 2021. Before this, he held a fellowship at the ICI Berlin and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD in English at King’s College London. His research focuses on the intellectual histories of feminist, queer and trans studies. His monograph – Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020) – rethinks the deeply embedded aversion to categories of ‘sameness’ across queer studies.

What is the relationship between social and mental alienation? How can one envision care and cure practices that counter the homogenizing policies of institutions and go beyond the neoliberal economy of individual well-being? The evening explores the legacies of institutional psychotherapy, a psychiatric reform and resistance movement that emerged in France in response to the fascist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. Initiated at Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital by a collective of Marxist psychiatrists, activists, philosophers, and nuns from the Saint-Régis community, Jewish refugees and surrealist artists (among them Georges Canguilhem, Tristan Tzara, Jacques Matarasso, Paul Éluard, and Nusch Éluard), the movement embraced group therapies and patient-run cooperatives. The publication of Psychotherapy and Materialism (ICI Berlin Press, 2024) edited by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman, offers the first English translation of two seminal texts by institutional psychotherapy co-inventors François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist and anarcho-syndicalist, and Jean Oury, founder of the La Borde clinic. Their materialist and ‘disalienationist’ approach was further developed in Frantz Fanon’s decolonial psychiatry and Félix Guattari’s schizoanalysis. It led to a radical rethinking of psychoanalysis, education, and social work promoted by figures like Gisela Pankow, Anne Querrien, and Ginette Michaud. Joana Masó is a professor of French literature at the University of Barcelona. She is a researcher with the UNESCO Chair on Women, Development, and Cultures, and works at the intersection of literature, critical thinking, contemporary art, and curating exhibitions. She has coedited Hélène Cixous’s essays dedicated to art, Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Since 2017, she has led the research project ‘The Forgotten Legacy of Tosquelles’ at the University of Barcelona, under the ADHUC — Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality. She has published Nusch Eluard: Sous le surréalisme, les femmes (Seghers, Paris, 2024), the exhibition catalogue Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry, Radical Politics and Art, co-edited with Carles Guerra et al for the American Folk Art Museum in New York (2024), and the forthcoming title Tosquelles: Curing the Institutions (Semiotext(e), 2025). She is currently working on different modalities of restitution of Dubuffet’s art brut through Tosquelles’ critical legacy. Marlon Miguel is Co-Principal Investigator of the project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at the Media Faculty of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin. He holds a double PhD in Fine Arts and Philosophy. His current research proposes to critically inquire into the notion of ‘disorder’ and to de-essentialize it, looking at the use of artistic media in critical psychiatric practices such as those of François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Fernand Deligny, and Nise da Silveira. Christian Scheerhorn studied philosophy and comparative literature in Paris and Berlin. He is currently completing a Master’s degree at Freie Universität Berlin with a research focus on the intersections of literature, media, and French philosophy. As a Student Research Assistant, he contributes to the project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, exploring the history of institutional psychotherapy and its media and milieu practices. Elena Vogman is a media theorist, Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at the Media Faculty of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin... Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/instituting-care_psychotherapy-and-materialism/

Originally applied to preserve a materialist worldview that extends beyond physics and chemistry, the notion of levels of organization is one of the most recognizable ideas in biology. Although sometimes (erroneously) used interchangeably, the relationship between ‘levels’ and ‘scale’ presents an exciting (and relatively unexplored) area in theoretical biology and the history and philosophy of science. Here, Brooks will address this lacuna by clarifying how the two notions can inform and enhance one another. To this effect, he links up the idea of levels of organization with the insight that putative levels (e.g., cells, tissue, and ecosystems) exhibit distributed clustering that extends across scale ranges rather than particular part-whole demarcations. This ‘local maxima’ approach suggests that levels should be seen as a spectrum, where attributing discrete identity (as a particular type of, e.g., cell, tissue, ecosystem) is distributed across distinct and moderately localized or regional resolutions in time and space. Daniel S. Brooks is a professor for theoretical philosophy at the University of Wuppertal. His research interests span the history and philosophy of the life sciences (particularly developmental biology, ecology, and neuroscience), concept usage in science, naturalized epistemology, methodology in philosophy of science, and existentialism. He has held multiple research fellowships, including at the Konrad Lorenz Institute, Ruhr-University Bochum, and the University of Minnesota. His current project focuses on a systematic investigation and analysis of the concept of levels of organization in contemporary and historical biological thought. His edited volume on levels, titled Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences and co-edited with James DiFrisco and William C. Wimsatt, appeared in 2021 at MIT Press. More info can be found at www.danielsbrooks.com. Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/daniel-s-brooks/

In Africa, a combination of cultural and religious practices, repressive laws instituted during the colonial period, and homophobic nationalisms have ensured that individuals who identify as queer experience their difference in private spaces and at the margins of societies. African people who identify as queer navigate different forms of social silence and this has an important impact on how they toggle between invisibility and visibility and ultimately how they experience embodiment and relationality. Given such a situation, Gibson Ncube explores queer lived experiences in Africa through the lens of the body in films. The body in films is a powerful model for understanding the complexities of identity, desire, and gender within diverse African communities. By examining how queer individuals navigate their physical selves in relation to societal norms, it is possible to gain insight into the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and cultural contexts. Drawing mainly on the work Ncube did in the book Queer Bodies in African Films (2022), he contends that the filmed body as a model serves as a canvas upon which societal expectations and personal expressions of gender and sexual identities collide. By zooming in on the body, Ncube is interested in how the filmed queer body is invested with multiple and often intersecting discourses and narratives. It is inscribed with more than just desire, eroticism, and sexuality. It is as a disruptive figure whose materiality calls for a rethinking not just of how gender and sexual identities are performed and staged but also how they are constructed and embodied. Thus, considering the body as a model allows for a rich understanding of the multifaceted tapestry of queer lived experiences in Africa. Gibson Ncube lectures at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He has held fellowships supported by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center (USA) and Leeds University Centre for African Studies (UK). He is currently an AfOx Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. He has published widely in the fields of comparative literature, gender and queer studies as well as cultural studies. He co-convened the Queer African Studies Association (2020-2022) and was the 2021 Mary Kingsley Zochonis Distinguished Lecturer (African Studies Association, UK). He currently sits on the Editorial Boards of the following journals: Journal of Literary Studies, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and the Nordic Journal of African Studies. He is currently the Assistant Editor of the South African Journal of African Languages and the French Book Review Editor for the Canadian Journal of African Studies. Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/gibson-ncube/

Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/teresa-fankhaenel/ Theodore Conrad was an architect and master craftsman. His miniatures of Plexiglas and aluminum modelled a post-war landscape of glass-and-steel skyscrapers, sprawling business campuses, and domestic mid-century modernism from the 1930s onward. With the help of electrified tools and cameras, a vision of a world in Kodachrome arose long before it existed. Architectural modelling — long before the digital turn — became a powerful tool for testing, constructing, rendering, and selling novel architectural ideas. Teresa Fankhänel is an associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and editor-in-chief of the Architectural Exhibition Review. Her recent exhibitions include African Mobilities (2018), The Architecture Machine (2020–21), Built Together (2021), Shouldn’t You Be Working?(2023), and Andrea Canepa: As We Dwell in the Fold (2023). Among her interests are the use of technology and media for architectural design, and the history, theory, and practice of architecture exhibitions. She was a curatorial assistant for the exhibition The Architectural Model (Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 2012) and has published two books on models: The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad (2021) and An Alphabet of Architectural Models (2021). She is co-editor of the book Are You A Model?, a collection of new research on analog and digital models, which will be published in 2023. Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/teresa-fankhaenel/

Rather than take up the literary world’s on and off obsession with classifications and genre demarcations, this talk will center on the relationship between ideas, things, forms, and shapes — how writing can be a practice of, as poet A. R. Ammons once put it, looking for ‘the forms|things want to come as’. What does it mean for a thing to want to come as a form? What is the relationship between the content of an idea and its shape on the page? To examine such questions, Nelson will read from a variety of her works and think about how they relate (or don’t) to poet Robert Creeley’s famous contention, ‘form is never more than an extension of content’. Possible tributary lines of thought include: the literary nature of (some) philosophy; the question of ‘vernacular scholarship’ (a term coined by Eileen Myles), various strategies of performing the self in writing; and the value of never settling, of staying on the move. Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming collection Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (2007), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005). In 2016 she received a MacArthur ‘genius’ Fellowship. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles, CA. In English, with Maggie Nelson, Introduction by Mark Anthony Cayanan The talk will be followed by a Q&A with Marta Aleksandrowicz and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/maggie-nelson/