Marie-José Mondzain has been analysing the history of images for years and has traced a rigorous genealogy to consider the close link between economy and icononomy. She was motivated by a concern to ascertain the conditions under which images began to fulfil specific functions in the strategies of power and its control of desire.

If imagining operations can be endowed with an essential energy, then one must recognize the fictional energy that can displace a regime of visibility and give rise in the images to what the bureaucratic organization of inhospitality never ceases to expel. These two sessions aim to reflect on how images can bring us something that we cannot reject, what does not come as information but makes an event in the meeting with a gaze.

Wednesday 15 June, 7 pm - What the image accommodates

In this session we will introduce the problem of hospitality referring to images, with the aim of asking ourselves what images can accommodate. This refers to the question of the arrival, that is, how to bring something against which we must not remain defenceless. We will pay attention to the displacements that images can perform through their fictional energy, their poetic and political gesture. In this session we will watch the film L'Ordre by Jean Daniel Pollet, and we will discuss some of the fundamental issues that this documentary addresses in relation to the problem of hospitality.

Thursday 16 June, 7 pm - The hospitality of images

In the second session, Marie-José Mondzain will make a broad display of the power of images to achieve the displacement of an imaginary and to activate another memory, contrary to the colonizing forms that have marked our collective memory: the growing increase in racism, the various forms of exclusion and the violence of inhospitality against all foreigners and against all alienization. We wish to explore the urgency of the gestures that can disrupt the gazes of their hegemonic direction as a means to interrupt the paths that have been traced.

Marie-José Mondzain, a philosopher specialized in images and emeritus research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Her reflections have focused on images, icons and visual productions, with special attention to the link between economy and oikonomy. She has published more than a dozen books, including her emblematic work Image, icône, économie : les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (1996); Le Commerce des regards (2003); Homo spectator (2013); L’Image peut-elle tuer? (2015); Confiscation : des mots, des images et du temps (2017); and K comme Kolonie, Kafka et la décolonisation de l’imaginaire (2020).

Andrea Soto Calderón is a doctor of Philosophy and professor of Aesthetics and Theory of Art. She has carried out her research in Valparaíso, Barcelona, Lisbon and Paris. Her research focuses on the transformations of the aesthetic experience in contemporary culture, criticism, artistic research, the study of images and the media, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Among her recent publications are her book El trabajo de las imágenes, written with Jacques Rancière (2019) and La performatividad de las imágenes (2020).