Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory. SFSIA stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. This year, in addition to the Berlin academy, we are hosted by Otis College of Art and Design at their Los Angeles campus with participation of the MA Aesthetics and Politics in the School of Critical Studies, CalArts. The program runs two weeks and is structured with half-day seminars, deep readings, and workshops. In the evening SFSIA holds a lecture series, which is open to the public. It is an exciting, rigorous environment to learn in.
Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art | Berlin, 2018 is titled Art and the Poetics of Praxis in Cognitive Capitalism. The seminar will revisit pressing topics of past programs (such as estrangement and individuation) in order to consider the potential healing of a general intellect, now fragmented, dispossessed and restricted by the power of virtuality and techno-linguistic governance. As Franco Berardi has observed, the rising generation is the first to have learned more words from a machine than from their mothers; the result is —in a sense quite different from that intended by Rimbaud— an immense dérèglement de tous les sens or deregulation of signification: a break between meaning and the body. Disempathy is one result. In The Uprising, Berardi calls on poetry to revitalize and reactivate the precarious social body and reconnect a collective intelligence by way of forging singular voices and autonomous resonances. Berardi’s call to poiesis is where this year’s Institute begins.
More information: saasfeesummerinstituteofart.com