Menschsein spielen

David Zerbib

DAVID ZERBIB teaches philosophy of art at the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in Geneva and at the École Supérieure d’Art Annecy Alpes (ESAAA). He is a member of the Centre for the History of Modern Philosophies at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and researches contemporary aesthetics, especially questions of performance and performativity. Together with Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, he published Performance Studies in Motion. International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century (London: Bloomsbury 2014), edited the book In octavo. Des formats de l’art (ESAAA: Presses du réel 2015) and is responsible for the forthcoming edition of Helmuth Plessner’s Anthropologie philosophique de l’acteur. Imitation, expression et existence humaine (Paris: Presses de Paris Nanterre).

Boisseau & Westermeyer

SYLVIE BOISSEAU is an artist. She lives and works in Berlin and Geneva. FRANK WESTERMEYER is an artist and associate professor at HEAD – Geneva. They work together under the name BOISSEAU/WESTERMEYER on video and film installations, among other artistic works, which are shown internationally both in art houses and at festivals.

With ƒ, an experimental figure they created in 1997, they try to show the extent to which language is permeated by projections and various expectations. It was only in 2010, during a research seminar, that their attention was drawn to the proximity of their work to the theories of Helmuth Plessner and the concept of eccentric positionality. Following this, they formulated the asubject of their second artistic research project, nach Produktion von Landschaft, Produktion von Identität. Künstlerische, ethnohistorische und anthropologische Perspektiven auf den Süden Chiles (19. bis 20. Jahrhundert).

The project presented here explores those forms and discourses that can emerge at the intersection of artistic and philosophical method.