How does forgetting and the processes of individual and cultural amnesia shape our sense of the world and our capacity to imagine the future? Why is aesthetic intelligence and the practice of art so vital to understanding and living with memory loss?

Invisible Architectures: Lesions in the Landscape is a two day symposium exploring how interactions between art and clinical practices, critical thinking and neuroscience can transform the ways we understand memory, forgetting and amnesia.

Focusing on the idea of embodied experience across diverse individual, social, political, cultural and digital landscapes, the event brings together a range of speakers – from artists and writers to scientists, cultural theorists, historians and social psychologists.

Invisible Architectures: Lesions in the Landscape is organised by Shona Illingworth, alongside Jill Bennett as part of Lesions in the Landscape, a project exploring the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory, and the wider implications of memory loss on identity, space and imagining the future.
BOOK TICKETS HERE

Programme: Saturday 29th October

11.00-11.20 Registration

11.20-11.30 Welcome: Gareth Evans, Shona Illingworth and Jill Bennett

11.30-12.00 Shona Illingworth, Artist and Reader in Fine Art, University of Kent

Lesions in the Landscape
12.00- 12.20 Catherine Loveday, Neuropsychologist and Principal Lecturer,

University of Westminster
Living with amnesia – scientific study and working with Claire.

12.20-13.00 Screening: Time Present (2016)

Shona Illingworth

13.00 -14.00 Lunch Break

Session one

14.00 – 15.30

This session will discuss methods for investigating the experiential dimensions of memory loss—from forms of aesthetic engagement and creative inquiry, to psycho-social techniques and studies in critical social psychology.

Jill Bennett, Professor and Director of the National Institute for Experimental Art at UNSW Sydney, Australia.

Lynn Froggett, Professor of Psychosocial Welfare and Director of the Psychosocial Welfare Unit, University of Lancaster

Steve Brown, Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology, University of Leicester

Steve Klee, Artist and writer, Lecturer in Fine Art, University of Kent

15.30 -15.50 Break

15.50- 16.20 First performance of Time Lapse –

A new work by composer Jan Hendrickse,

made in collaboration with poet Owen Lowery.

Simon Allen: Percussion, Sandro Mussida: Cello

Session two

16.20 – 17.10

This session explores critical perspectives on aesthetics of control and technological mediation. It challenges the phenomenon of disembodiment (drawing on critical theories of media, the body and affect) as well as regimes of visibility and remembering.
Lisa Blackman, Professor in Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College

Jaime Del Val, Meta-media artist, philosopher, performer, producer, environmental and postqueer activist, Director of Reverso Institute www.reverso.org and of Metabody Project www.metabody.eu.

17.10 -17.50 Panel discussion (Chair: Jill Bennett)

Programme: Sunday 30th October

11.00-11.20 Registration

11.20-11.30 Welcome

Session three

11.30 – 13.00

This session looks at techniques for mapping cultural amnesia and agency in the contexts of cultural erasure, gender and decolonial practices.

Shona Illingworth, Artist and Reader in Fine Art, University of Kent. Mapping Amnesia, Agency and Cultural Landscape in Lesions in the Landscape

Catherine Hall, Professor and Chair Emerita of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership

Caterina Albano, Reader in Visual Culture and Science, University of the Arts London

Panel chaired by Errol Francis, Chief Executive, Cultural Co-operation (tbc)

13.00 – 14.00 Break

Session four

14.00 – 15.30

This session focuses on material landscape and consciousness, examining techniques for reading processes of engagement with the landscape’s past and its social and political present.

Lambros Malafouris, Johnson Research and Teaching Fellow in Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture, Keble College, Oxford University

Patrick Wright, Professor of Literature and Visual & Material Culture, Kings College

Baltic, Hudson and Thames: Uwe Johnson’s view from a window on Marine Parade, Sheerness.

14.50- 15.30 Screening: Lo Specchio Di Diana (1996) Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

15.30 – 16.00 Break

Session five

16.00- 17.00

This session presents a series of films that examine the processes of cultural erasure and forgetting through reframing desire, language and intentionality, creating new latencies in order to change the shape of imagined futures.

Karen Alexander, Independent Film and Moving Image Curator
Black Atlantic Cinema Club

Luciano Zubillaga, Artist and Filmmaker
Music For a Missing Film

17.00- 17.50 Panel discussion (Chair Shona Illingworth)