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Siegmar Zacharias profile

Siegmar Zacharias

University of Roehampton London (2018 )

Thesis

Posthuman Poetics as Ethics

About

My Phd project takes place at the intersection between art, philosophy and political ecology, and is an investigation of how they perform in the face of each other. It proposes to develop a philosophical text, a performance and a curatorial format that formulate a Posthuman Poetics as Ethics investigating the concept of phronesis (practical virtue/behaviour that prepares for change towards the better). It will use technologies, practices and poetics developed and derived from performance practice. It focuses on new materialist, feminist approaches, that it will describe as posthuman practices. The questions it will tackle are: What kind of ethics produces what kind of aesthetics?What kind of artistic practices produce what kind of ethics? How is art production, the work itself, and art reception a training ground for a future political imaginary? In a time when the boarders between nature and culture, human and non-human, living and nonliving have become destabilised, I will posit performance art as a learning ground for developing and enduring dynamic systems that are not pre-determined, but generative and co-created acrossdivers agents in spite of existing power dynamics.What is at stake is a posthuman poetics as ethics that prepares us to imagine alternative enactments of the world in a time where differences have become processes of discontinuous differentiation.  They do not allow a formulation of a commonly grounded prescriptive ethics but ask for a processual, generative ethical engagement on poetical, aesthetical, and onto-material grounds. This practice led research project will accumulate case studies, material experimentations and philosophical writings. Through critically analysis, creative development and ongoing conceptualisation I will show how new materialist thinking, posthuman theory and new performance practices intersect and produce iterations of ethical dynamics.