Unmapping the Renaissance

de Angelika Stepken

"Since the 1990s, ethnographical and anthropological representations are being critically examined and aesthetic positionings are challenged in artistic inquiries and practices through chronopolitics and techniques of distancing. Contemporary art production is global and reflects the colonization of gazes and conceits. This documentation of the symposium Unmapping the Renaissance, which took place in Florence in the spring of 2015, follows critical resurveys of the mental map of a canonical and canonizing understanding of culture and period-concept: in a dialog between scholarship and art, whose performative practices are intended to decidedly transcend established academic formats, the event considers the connections between hegemonic sign systems, imagination and (de-)colonial practices."--