ICA 2022: ‘Contemporary Aesthetics: Dialogues through Art, Culture and Media’

Belo Horizonte, Brasil, del 25 al 29 de julio de 2022. El próximo Congreso Internacional de Estética se celebrará bajo el título ‘Contemporary Aesthetics: Dialogues through Art, Culture and Media’. Fecha límite para envío de resúmenes: 15 de septiembre de 2021.

By choosing the topic “Contemporary Aesthetics: Dialogues through Art, Culture and Media” as its main theme, the organizing committee of the 22nd International Congress of Aesthetics (ICA 22) aims at the increasing and deepening of the discussion by today’s practitioners of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, about the modes, through which this field of knowledge could contribute to enhance peaceful and fruitful contacts among the most different people and cultures of the world.

Facing to it, the central goal of ICA22 is to promote ways to understand and share the experiences of how aestheticians, philosophers, artists, art, culture and media theorists, media entrepreneurs, architects, designers, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities, social sciences and arts think the relations between art, culture and media in a way of problematizing norms and processes of naturalizing human phenomena in the very notion of culture. As a matter of fact, the nowadays quite common insertion of artistic and aesthetic research and practices in the media presupposes a critical posture towards social and political constructions involving concepts of identity and difference. Consequently, they bring to the center of the debate on culture and media not only the traditional subject matters of philosophical aesthetics, but marginalized forms of representation and experience of sexuality and gender, class, race / ethnicity and territory, technology and so forth, including the countless activities of daily life.

This is the reason why among the topics related to the main theme of congress include new media, design, aesthetics of the body and of the sports, as well as the different ways in which aesthetics is carried on nowadays in Continental Europe,  Anglo-American field, Asia, Africa and Latin-America.

Since the whole world today is menaced by anti-democratic and anti-humanistic political forces — and retaking Friedrich Schiller’s inspiration concerning an aesthetic education of humankind —, the concept of the congress also includes the possibility of debates about activistic practices concerning cultural matters, the potential aesthetics to help the rebuilding of democratic convictions, the prevention of barbarism and to foster social and politic pluralism.

All this points also to the recent discussions on “decolonial aesthetics”, and since in 2022 the centenary of the “Modern Art Week” — an event that marked the entering of Brazilian culture in realm of contemporary artistic expressions — is going to be commemorated, Oswald de Andrade’s conception of  cultural “anthropophagy”, understood as a result of  the mentioned event, is going to be discussed and celebrated as well.

ORGANIZATION OF CONGRESS/

The Brazilian Association of Aesthetics (ABRE), founded for the first time in 1994, in Rio de Janeiro, and re-grounded in 2006 in Belo Horizonte, in cooperation with the Graduate Studies Program of Philosophy and the Graduate Studies Program of Arts of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), is willing to organize the 22nd ICA In Belo Horizonte, State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The Philosophy Department of the UFMG has a long tradition in studies and actions in Aesthetics (dating from 1969 with the creation of its “Laboratory of Aesthetics”) and since 1993 it has been involved in the organization of biannual large conferences on this matter, which attracts researchers and students from many countries and regions around the world.

The last one, Arts of the body, bodies of art was held last October in the baroque town Ouro Preto — near Belo Horizonte — and was organized by ABRE in cooperation with the Federal University of Ouro Preto and the Federal University of Minas Gerais. In this occasion, over two hundred papers and lectures were presented by researchers and graduate students coming from all regions from Brazil and from abroad as well. Both institutions — ABRE and UFMG — are going to be represented in the organizing committee of 22nd IAA Congress. The organization of the congress is going to rely on the excellent infrastructure of the UFMG in issues like classrooms and amphitheaters, technology of information and communication, as well as secretaries to help in the tasks of registration and to offer support to the participants of the conference. There is also a concrete possibility of receiving financial help from federal agencies of support to research (CNPq — National Council of Scientific and Technological Development) and higher education (CAPES — Coordination of Development of Researchers in Higher Education).

Organizing Committee/

Rodrigo Duarte – Federal University of Minas Gerais (Chair)
Rachel Cecília de Oliveira – Federal University of Minas Gerais
Rizzia Rocha – Federal University of Minas Gerais
Fernanda Proença – Federal University of Minas Gerais
Walter Menon – Federal University of Minas Gerais
Miguel Gally – University of Brasilia
Juliana Pereira – Federal University of Minas Gerais

Scientific Board/

Curtis Carter (US)
Gao Jianping (China)
Joosik Min (South Korea)
Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Poland)
Miško Suvakovic (Serbia)
Sanna Lehtinen (Finland)
Zoltan Somhegyi (Hungary)

ICA 2022 SESSIONS/