Mia Degner - on self-silencing

In the frame of the final project of the Curatorship seminar, Mia Degner joined  the MA and PhD students of The Lisbon Consortium, at the HANGAR, on November 17th to discuss the politics of self-silencing in art and writing.

Mia Degner is a writer, editor and writing teacher. She made her debut at Gyldendal in 2012 with the poetry collection A vertical dream. She has since published four more books, most recently the short story collection Havet og vek (2021), which is a collection of coming-of-age short stories about parent-child relationships and sibling relationships. Mia Degner has 10 years of experience teaching creative writing for pre-school, intermediate and upper secondary education, including through CFU, UC SYD.

The discussion unfolded around the idea of making proposals for (an) art world(s). Starting from the ideas sketched below and a series of 3 workshops, the students will be co-writing 3 manifestos.

As artistic/cultural institutions become increasingly global/ international/ transnational in their scope, they are faced with tremendous responsibilities: to collect, preserve, and show the (hidden) multi micro-narratives told by the many who make up the world. Alike speculative realism (Harman, 2018), and while challenging the multipolar Western institutional structures (grand-narratives told by few) that they inhabit (Gupta and Watson, 2016), such responsibilities imply a spirit of imaginative audacity, mutability, and exchange, integrating both human and non-human experiences, knowledge, and stories. Considering the danger of hegemonic absorption of dissonant practices into canonical art historical and curatorial discourses – which would imply the deactivation of conflictual questions that may defy Western notions of quality, influence, originality, work of art vs. artifact etc. –, this project aims to ask: How do the artistic/cultural practices respond to (and, therefore, (ex)change with) the different challenges – curatorial, art historical, educational, but also economic and political – posed by the collection and exhibition of works from a variety of world regions?