Norman MacColl Symposium 2017: Magical Dispossessions: Nature, Capital and Conflict in Colombia
28th and 29th April, Alison Richard Building SG1, University of Cambridge
Detail from Herbario de las Plantas Artificiales by Alberto Baraya
If dispossession can signal the limits of our self-sufficiency as subjects, it also names the condition of precarity in which many populations find themselves today. Subjects can be “dispossessed” of themselves by virtue of being moved or disconcerted by an encounter with alterity; and yet dispossession is also what occurs when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood. The aim of this one-day symposium is to explore these meanings of dispossession, and in an interdisciplinary manner that addresses the ways in which processes of capital extraction and territorial reorganization currently mediate interlocking forms of political, social, economic and symbolic violence in Colombia. It is also to reflect on the historical continuities between imperial forms of “primitive accumulation” and neo-imperial forms of “accumulation by dispossession”.
The symposium organised is organized by Dr Rory O’Bryen, Tatiana Vargas-Ortiz and Rosanna Hunt of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, in conjunction with the Norman MacColl Lecture 2017.
This year’s Norman MacColl lecturer is the Colombian artist, Alberto Baraya, who will open the symposium in the evening of the 28th April with his lecture ‘A Journey: On the Expedition Considered as one of the Fine Arts’. In this he will reflect on his recent projects A Herbarium of Artificial Plants (Herbario de las Plantas Artificiales) and Anthropometric Approximations (Antropometrías Aproximadas), and their critical revisitation of Enlightenment Science in Latin America.
On the 29th our invited speakers Lesley Wylie, Nick Morgan, María Estrada Fuentes, Erna von der Walde and Austin Zeiderman, will give 50-minute presentations on landscape and literature, botany and politics as well as on post-conflict art, economics and public space, as these open up new angles on historic and contemporary questions surrounding nationhood and dispossession.
Please, sign up here by Thursday 20 April.
*The conference will be held in English and Spanish.
**The conference is free to attend and open to all but please register above by Thursday 20 April.
***Lunch will be provided.
Please, visit our website for more information.
